Quick Roundup 471

Monbiot on Debating Science

He smears "climate change deniers" by lumping them together with creationists, and is guilty of an ad hominem attack later in this opinion piece. Nevertheless, George Monbiot makes the following thought-provoking point about scientific debates before lay audiences:

[T]rying to debate with ["deniers"] is a frustrating and often futile exercise. It takes 30 seconds to make a misleading scientific statement and 30 minutes to refute it. By machine-gunning their opponents with falsehoods, the deniers put scientists in an impossible position: either you seek to answer their claims, which can't be done in the time available, or you let them pass, in which case the points appear to stand. Many an eminent scientist has come unstuck in these situations. This is why science is conducted in writing, where claims can be tested and sources checked.

Unfortunately, Monbiot is discussing Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven and Earth, which I have recently read. Plimer has, in my opinion, unfortunately, set the table very nicely for Monbiot and other proponents of the Anthropogenic Global Warming view, as well as those who hope to use it as an excuse to greatly expand state control over the economy.

Leaving the book and the scientific debate aside for the moment, Monbiot's ad hominem raises some interesting questions.

Most of the prominent climate change deniers who are not employed solely by the fossil fuel industry have a similar profile: men whose professional careers are about to end or have ended already.

For one thing, the raising of the issue, however underhandedly, of a scientist's funding source possibly undermining his integrity hides in plain sight the fact that a great many scientists on his side arguably regard it as in their interests to ensure an uninterrupted flow of state research funds for their work. For another, it brings up a set of interrelated questions I have been contemplating for some time: What is the right time, place, and way to educate the public on scientific matters?

State funding of science, by entangling scientific debate with public policy, has unparalleled potential to corrupt the science itself and, by often prematurely or inappropriately making highly specialized matter the business of untrained laypeople, to hinder objective communication about scientific findings.

He probably does...

There are many, many things I disagree with in this blog posting on a recent speech about innovation by Barack Obama, but I think the following quote is much closer to the truth than its author does:

It is therefore conceivable that President Obama thinks innovation will occur as a result of altruistic means and in spite of patent protection.

Of course, it's also conceivable, given the effects many of his other policies will eventually have on the economy, that Barack Obama doesn't really want innovation to occur at all.

A License to Beg

If roads were privately-owned, I suspect that there would be no impetus for the government to issue permits to panhan-- I mean, trespassers .

Of Features and Bugs

During a fascinating discussion about "e-memory," Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell makes the following quip:

Forgetting is not a feature, it's a flaw. I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

His remark indrectly reminds me that control of when you remember things -- which could loosely be called "forgetting" -- actually is a feature. Just ask someone with super autobiographical memory (aka hyperthymesia).

Probably the best known of the four, Jill Price has described her "gift" as "nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting." She was the first to be diagnosed with the condition, and recently published a memoir, The Woman Who Can't Forget. Price remembers most details of nearly every day she's been alive since she was 14 and compares her super memory to walking around with a video camera on her shoulder. "If you throw a date out at me, it's as if I pulled a videotape out, put in a VCR and just watched the day," she has said. [minor edits, formatting dropped]

Of course, Bell's work offers the interesting prospect of striking a happy medium between Jill Price's indiscriminate recall of everything and getting the past information you actually need when you need it.

That said, it does also raise the question of whether you'd want to rely too heavily on e-memory. I face basically the same issue every time I drive in Boston, and consider whether to use GPS. For now, I don't, because being lost is part of how you learn your way around.

-- CAV

Wrong Can

Residents of a locality in England were recently surprised to find people going through their trash. Understandably concerned about what might be going on near their own homes, they checked into the matter only to be greeted with another unpleasant surprise:

When homeowners questioned the official binmen an hour later they learned their council was conducting a survey of what was being thrown away.

The 'spies' were part of a week-long waste analysis study by the Northamptonshire Waste Partnership, a collaboration of eight local authorities working to reduce rubbish going to landfill. An external contractor was told to go through the bins of residents.

One thousand houses were targeted as part of the survey, including 780 in Northamptonshire.

But none of the inhabitants of Cedar Close, Irchester, near Wellingborough, Northants, had received any notice from their council about what was going on.

Resident Gillian Barnett, 61, said the snoopers made her feel 'very uncomfortable'.

She said: 'Three young men parked outside my house and just started going through my bins - I thought they were pinching my rubbish. It was very suspicious.

'We haven't had a leaftlet or a letter, all my neighbours were going round asking each other what was happening.

Yes. Their local government was spying on them in order to see whether they were recycling. This isn't the first time I've heard of this -- a council in Australia is or was weighing its residents' trash -- but it is the first time I've heard of people being sent door-to-door to examine what items were being thrown away.

Interestingly, while I was glad to see several interviewees outraged about this, I also noted that the anger doesn't go deep enough:

Matthew Elliott, chief executive at the TaxPayers' Alliance, condemned Northampton County Council for what he described as an 'aggressive' campaign.

He said: 'This sneaky behaviour on the part of the council is underhand and alarming.

'Taxpayers are sick and tired of being spied on by their councils, it is an infringement of both their dignity and personal space.

'People are doing all they can to recycle, if they are throwing something away it's because they have to.

'This approach is unnecessarily aggressive and a waste of taxpayers' money and precious resources.'

Elliott's last two sentences undercut what he said earlier, first at the moral level and second at the political. It's the same classic, "I agree with their ends, but not with their means," nonsense I remember from too many people during the Cold War. There is nothing noble about the idea of stealing from the productive.

The whole idea behind recycling -- when it does not actually save money -- is wrong because the only proper moral standard is that which promotes one's own life. When recycling does not make sufficient economic sense to motivate individuals to pursue it selfishly, it is a waste of his time. (This includes when the government imposes such artificial "incentives" as forcing people to pay a few cents extra for, say, an aluminum can, for later redemption.)

Politically, then, government-forced (or even government-"encouraged") recycling is wrong because the government, rather than fulfilling its proper purpose, the protection of individual rights, is instead being subverted towards the goal of forcing people to waste time from their lives. This is always true. The only difference here is that this particular form of coercion was too obvious not to upset most people.

Anyone who is (rightly) upset about the government commissioning the trespass of random garbage cans, rather than throwing trespassers into a different sort of can, has some thinking to do: He should reconsider whether recycling as a moral ideal and whether the government ought to be doing anything other than merely protecting individual rights.

Removing today's government spies one at a time from the trash won't stop this onslaught against property rights. Only individual citizens uprooting their own bad moral and political premises can reverse this trend and lead to better, freer times -- when politicians eventually learn that such behavior will not be tolerated on any level.

If you find some kid rummaging through a trash can near you, ask yourself what put him there. If you support government recycling programs, then you brought it on yourself. Please clean up your act.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 470

An ACORN a Day ...

Kathleen Parker has written an interesting piece about the ACORN prostitution scandal that notes tie-ins via one of the nation's largest labor unions to both scandal-plagued former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama's drive for a government takeover of your medical care. (Another article in the Wall Street Journal notes the President's longstanding relationship with the left-wing organization.)

ACORN and the SEIU are hand and glove. [ACORN co-founder Wade] Rathke himself referred to the SEIU as "one of the pillars of the ACORN family of organizations" in a June 9, 2007, blog posting. This coziness has been long known among conservative watchdog groups, but Washington has paid little attention until now.

And, later:

One needn't be a mathematician to imagine what a national health-care option might mean to a union in search of new dues-paying recruits. The SEIU, which has promised "to fight tooth and nail" for a public option, is demonstrably persuasive. In Illinois, former governor Blagojevich (thank you for your patience) helped position the SEIU so that it could unionize health-care workers when he signed an executive order allowing collective bargaining. The SEIU showed its appreciation in advance by becoming Blagojevich's largest contributor, handing over $1.8 million for his two gubernatorial campaigns.

While it's good to see a few shafts of light penetrate into this scandal, with the promise that this might, in the short term damage, the push for physician slavery (among other statist initiatives of the current administration), the long-term danger is that this scandal will distract from the real problems America faces politically.

If you don't know what I mean, just recall the misguided, penny-ante efforts of the Pork Busters, who, as I put it long ago, focus "on petty theft and [turn] a blind eye to grand larceny." Corruption is a serious problem, to be sure, but note how much the existence of the welfare state multiplies the opportunities for political corruption to occur and potentially makes its consequences that much more devastating -- on top of the welfare state being inherently wrong.

I am concerned that conservatives will waste inordinate effort on this scandal, while failing to oppose the welfare state on principled grounds. That's too bad, because the welfare state and the collectivist mentality that make it possible in a republic are the roots, trunk, and branches that make the acorns possible in the first place. (Actually, now that I think of it, this is literally true here. Why the hell did this outfit ever get government funding?)

Socialized medicine is morally wrong and impractical for the goal of maintaining good health for that very reason. It is worse than mere political corruption in that it will prove harmful even if administered by people trying their best to be squeaky clean.

Slacker Bloc MIA?

A recent story about flagging enthusiasm on college campuses across America for Barack Obama made an interesting point about his young supporters:

Erin Carroll, a 19-year-old sophomore at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, blames the lack of engagement on her generation's short attention span. They want change -- right now, she says -- and haven't gotten it.

"I feel like everybody walks around with their cell phone and their laptops. We feel like we need everything immediately. ...

...

Such is the fate of Generation Y, as they're known, both praised for their willingness to volunteer but also maligned as the "entitlement generation" ...

It's funny to see that Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of government handouts for all, is getting exactly the kind of support he deserves. Too bad there are enough people like this in America that he's our President.

Two Carnivals

Amy Mossoff is hosting the current Objectivist Roundup, and When Cats Attack! is hosting Carnival of the Cats.

Capitalist Stereotype, Statist Reality

A while back, I noted a small problem with the storyline of Disney's movie, Up!.

[T]he movie opens with a perfect example of a popular left-wing myth about property rights that Tom Bowden addressed in his recent OCON course, "Property Rights and Wrongs:" Its protagonist is the lone property owner holding out in the midst of a huge development, his house and yard being completely surrounded by active demolition and construction. As Bowden indicated in the course, this is ridiculous. A developer would line up his property purchases before doing anything like that, and if he couldn't get the land he needed, he'd develop elsewhere.

Interestingly enough, this very problem has actually occurred in China.

After a row with developers, this family's home has been left perched 12m (40ft) up on its own concrete island.

It all started when they refused to accept compensation to move and, while the row rumbled on, the bulldozers excavated the site around them.

This resemblance to Up! is seasoned with a twist right out of Atlas Shrugged: The family's house still exists at all because of political connections.

The article goes on to note that a remedy is being considered: "[B]ehind the scenes is a debate, that has been raging for ten years, over the need for a law giving legal protection to private property in a Communist state."

-- CAV

Shoe Fiend

Like the other members of my family, Miss Maple appears here, when she does, under a pseudonym. I've owned her since she was eight weeks old, and she turned thirteen this month. I originally bought her in part to keep Jerome company after my divorce took me down to one cat in grad school.

The black coat is no accident: My particular circumstances practically screamed for it, as the superstitious associations with her fur color went quite well with the rough patch I was going through as well as the address of my new apartment, which included the number "13." Twice. (If only I could have gotten a "666" prefix for my phone number at the same time! Alas, that had to wait...)

So, knowing that female cats don't usually care to be picked up, but not knowing that it's difficult to sex kittens, I set out one weekend to purchase a black male kitten. A newspaper ad sent me about twenty minutes north of town to a trailer where someone was breeding cats. She said over the phone that she had several black kittens, so I went there to take my pick.

There was no doubt which one I would take home once I picked her up. She was much more lively than the others and she immediately looked straight into my eyes and rubbed noses with me. The breeder assured me she was male (Hah!) and even gave me a discount. (I would learn on a subsequent visit to the vet for a completely unrelated reason that "he" was not only a "she," but was also in heat.)

The reason for the discount became evident almost as soon as I turned in to my driveway at home. We'll just say that Miss Maple was a little bit messy for a while. Not being at home much, I had to confine her to the bathroom for a couple of months until she grew out of her problem. I suspect that that period, and always being in the shadow of Jerome's attention-grabbing, larger-than-life personality eventually caused her to become less sociable than she might otherwise have been.

Back in Houston, she'd often sulk in a corner by herself and would immediately leave if someone was petting her and Jerome came into the area -- which he always would if there was attention to be had. I hated that, and I would always remember a picture I had of her as a kitten, standing on my shoulder. I knew she liked attention, but, apparently, she wanted all of it or none.

And so it was that I decided that after Jerome, Miss Maple would have her day in the sun. There would be no second cat to steal attention from her. And now that she's the only cat, her old friendliness is starting to come out more. She has always been a sweet cat, but now she shows up for petting sessions without necessarily having to be coaxed. She's a little more vocal now, too. She almost never comes when called, but she will usually "answer" with a characteristic twist of the head. Best of all, she seems to have eased her old "boycott" on rubbing noses with me.


In addition to her coming out of her shell, she has also taken up a new habit: Sleeping on my shoes. The above shot (click to enlarge) was no fluke and took no particular planning or skill. She's always nestling herself on my shoes. In fact, that's where she usually is these days when I'm at my desk writing.

And that's a really good thing: This writer's gotta have a cat!

-- CAV

PS: This old Christmas shot of Miss Maple is too good to pass up.

Hollow Praise

It is common almost to the point of inevitability, that when one makes known his opposition to one welfare program or another, that some variant of, "What about the poor?" will surface. I have noted often enough here that the philosophical basis of such an objection is altruism, be it held explicitly in the other person's mind on making such an objection or, more often than not, held implicitly and confused with simple benevolence towards one's fellow man.

The point is, there is often a genuine (i.e., non-altruistic) concern for one's fellow man combined with an understandable lack of imagination at play. The state has handled things like education for so long that most people can't imagine it being handled in any other way, for example.

Fortunately, with the Obama Administration at the helm, it is quickly becoming apparent that, oftentimes, the "goods" and "services" "provided" by the state through looting are often worse than nothing at all.

For example, consider this example of public "education:"

I would laugh out loud at any adult who freely praised Barack Obama in this way or for his "accomplishments" (let alone both), but this is beyond a travesty. These kids -- because they are clearly not being educated -- have no basis for forming a judgment one way or the other about the President, but they are being taught to sing that he is a great man. This is being done using money -- and irreplaceable formative time from the lives of these children -- money and time that was supposed to be spent on them learning how to think (rather than what to say).

Both were stolen in the first place. The money was taken from productive Americans through taxation and inflation, and the time by means of this "public 'option'" for education, combined with compulsory education laws. How many of the parents here, thanks to this kind of "assistance," could afford the time or money to give or pay for an actual education instead of this?

This may be the kind of empty praise our collectivist President deserves, but children deserve much better than to be used to deliver it. It's high time to start talking in moral and practical terms about how else besides governmental theft and compulsion we can accomplish such important tasks as educating the young.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 469

2000th Post

As my blog approaches the five year mark in late October, it has already reached another milestone: This is my 2000th post.

I'll call that either a milestone or a millstone, depending on my mood when you ask me.

I have lately been reassessing how the blog will fit in to my writing career as part of taking full advantage of a more general decluttering opportunity that my recent move has afforded me. I think that blogging will fit in, but that I will need to cut down the amount of time I spend posting by about half, at least for the next year or so, to move towards my other non-blogging goals as a writer.

Whether I get there by making shorter posts or fewer posts is the big question...

Stay tuned. If I decide to make any drastic changes that I can't just smoothly transition into, I'll announce them.

Synergy: Pragmatism and Paternalism

I have never seen a better, more succinct example than the sentence below of the kind of unprincipled, expedient thinking that is transforming the United States from a land of freedom and opportunity to one of paternalism and stifling controls.

William Saletan of Slate writes about the wildfire-like spread of state controls on personal dietary choices:

If you're trying to sink health care reform, this is a good way to do it: Show everyone how subsidized health insurance will entitle other people to regulate your eating habits.

Saletan is right about one thing: These controls could well lead to a resounding defeat of medical insurance "reform" when people realize that they are direct consequences of same. Unfortunately, he is dead wrong about another: Refusing -- or blowing a chance to get his readers -- to step back and ask whether a government program that will, by its nature, lead to such things is really worth supporting in the first place. As a semi-conservative, he may be trying to provoke such a reaction, but he sounds too much like he's offering Obama unsolicited PR advice for my tastes.

You have to either reject the premise that you are entitled to use government loot to fulfill your needs or you have to acknowledge that you don't have a leg to stand on when some bureaucrat deems one of your favorite activities a waste of state money. You can't have it both ways. (A pragmatist will try to, anyway, but a rejection of principles on principle cannot magically cause you to escape the consequences of ignoring objective principles.)

Heh!

In the process of trying to find a web site for my favorite shopping center, I accidentally found a blog post about a half-interesting, half-amusing article on the "culture clash" that ensues when self-annointed urban elites step out of their cultural bubble long enough to shop there with the rest of us. (One note about the title: The proper adjective is, "snooty," not "snotty." Good. Got that one out of my system!)

I love the convenience this place offers: I can usually get away with not having to rent a car to do my shopping. Perhaps it's because I lived for so long in Houston before moving here, but nothing struck me as terribly remarkable about the demographic makeup of its clientele.

Interesting Site

I can't say that I agree with even most of what I found here, but Self-Promotion for Introverts strikes me as thought-provoking enough for at least another couple of visits.

-- CAV

One Man's Freedom ...

... Is Another Man's Noise

Back in the days of the Clinton Administration, I recall the way the left-dominated media lionized the First Lady. I also recall the right's reaction to same: It was to jokingly refer to Mrs. Clinton as the "Most Intelligent Woman in the World."

Today, the adoration of Barack Obama is no less slavish, and yet, we don't hear him being touted for his intelligence so much. This fits with the quasi-mystical cult of personality surrounding "the Obamassiah" as our President is now called by his opponents.

The Left still pretends to uphold reason in many cultural areas. Environmentalism is allegedly scientific. Dictating how land owners use their own property is euphemized as "smart growth." And then, of course, helping Iran pretend that its aggression against the West is a mere dispute that can be settled with some give-and-take is held as more civilized than the "violence" of (the necessity of) confronting that theocracy militarily.

But if there's one place the Left no longer even pretends to be rational, it's in the realm of domestic political debate. Just look at where Barack Obama's getting ready to head with the bailout bucket and consider his rationale:

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

...


Obama said that good journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy," but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting -- especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

Will Obama "look at" these bills with the same diligence he and his party have the rest of the legislation they have passed unread during his term? Or with that he used to learn and evaluate the facts of the Skip Gates arrest before speaking about it publicly? Is his conception of "shouting" the same as his conception of "bickering" about physician slavery? Is his respect for facts and freedom of speech the same as that he showed when he set up the national snitch line?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

"Shouting" about this back in February, I stopped just long enough to quote a newspaper about the whole, self-contradictory notion of government-financed journalism:

[N]ewspapers aren't the lifeblood of anything if they are merely an adjunct of the state. Independent journalism is valuable, but only if it is truly independent. A newspaper that is bankrolled by the state, even if it's only a loan, is going to have a strong interest in not criticizing the state. Perhaps this is one of Mr. Rendell's goals, since like all politicians he prefers a favorable press.

The business of journalism is changing, and many newspapers will vanish in the coming months and years. But that doesn't mean that journalism itself is vanishing. TV, radio and national newspapers have an audience in Philadelphia. Smaller papers like the Bulletin are also working hard to reach a larger audience in the city. Internet news operations have popped up in Minneapolis, San Diego and other places, often started by former reporters for the big-city dailies. The fastest way to kill a newspaper is to make it dependent on the politicians it is supposed to cover. [bold added]

And Nevada Senator Harry Reid illustrated that very point not too long ago. I'll quote another newspaper on that:

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: "I hope you go out of business."

Later, in his public speech, Reid said he wanted to let everyone know that he wants the Review-Journal to continue selling advertising because the Las Vegas Sun is delivered inside the Review-Journal.

...

For the sake of all who live and work in Nevada, we can't let this bully behavior pass without calling out Sen. Reid. If he'll try it with the Review-Journal, you can bet that he's tried it with others. So today, we serve notice on Sen. Reid that this creepy tactic will not be tolerated. [minor format edits, bold added]

And this is how Harry Reid is behaving when he can only, "[exact] some kind of economic punishment in retaliation for not seeing eye to eye with him on matters of politics." Just wait until he has even more direct control over the papers which, if they don't take the bailout, will find themselves competing with nonprofits that are under federal oversight and control.

And Reid is nothing compared to Obama, who couldn't finish nationalizing General Motors before telling its CEO to step down, and who is now ordering New York Governor David Paterson not to run in 2010.

Barack Obama is the most blatantly irrational President in American history. He quite literally sees his draconian, anti-American agenda to be as plain-as-day obvious and uncontroversial as the job a janitor would perform. How does he know he is right? I don't know, because he never explains why he thinks his programs will work or why he thinks they're are a good idea (besides saying they're motivated by altruism). He ought to be able to do that if it's so obvious, but he does not. I can only conlcude that he does not know why he wants to do these things, that he does not want anyone to know, or that he does not see a reason for us to know.

In the context of his eagerness to kill the news media with kindness, the above shows us that (1) His lip-service to good journalism ends with its expedience at excusing him (or altruism) from serious scrutiny; and (2) That nobody babbles on and on about what a brilliant man Barack Obama is partially because he acts like anything but a brilliant man.

Were Barack Obama a truly brilliant man, he would by now, in, say, the physician slavery debate, have either answered his critics persuasively or shown himself amenable to persuasion and admitted he was wrong.

But he has not. He has, instead, shown a childish contempt for dissent and begun taking steps to quash it.

And the fact that this is not raising a loud outcry among the left-dominated news media explains the rest of why people are not touting Obama as the World's Most Intelligent Man: The left no longer values (or pretends to value) reason enough to want (or pretend to want) "intelligence," its modern surrogate, in a leader, or enough to think it needs to persuade the American voter about anything.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

Quick Roundup 468

Tee Ball Strikeout

With millions of Americans obviously upset with the Obama Administration for its rush towards massive increases in government control of the economy, the Republicans are carefully reassessing their goals, and wisely planning a campaign to re-take Congress in 2010 based on a return of the federal government to its proper purpose, right?

Wrong. Not if the Values Voter Summit is any indication.

[T]he emphasis at the summit, sponsored the Family Research Council, was still decidedly on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. The crowd rose to its feet to applaud Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who caused a furor by denouncing same-sex marriage at the Miss USA contest, as she declared that "God chose me" to make the case she made.

Even Sarah Palin, citing a scheduling conflict, may have had the sense not to show for this one, although, if that were true, I would attribute it to opportunism rather than any principled opposition to the theocratic impulse that animates this portion of the conservative movement.

This "values voter" -- whose values have nothing to do with faith (or the above agenda) and which include freedom -- sees government enforcement of religious dogma for what it is: a threat to that freedom. This group only wants to capitalize on the massive intellectual confusion in America today to substitute their form of tyranny for the one presently being attempted in Washington. No thanks. That is not a choice.

If this is what the Republicans run on in 2010 -- or if I even suspect that this is what I will get if the GOP is swept into office -- I will not just sit out of this election. I'll vote to keep the more easily-identifiable enemies of freedom in office.

Update: In the comments, Burgess Laughlin notes a website that discusses the principles of a free society.

"You Learn Something, You Learn It"

If all you do is watch Don Knotts (as Barney Fife) "reciting" the Preamble to the Constitution at this Constitution Day post over at 3 Ring Binder, the visit will be worth your while.

But the quiz on which Founding Father you are is also good. I'm James Madison. Who are you?

More important, who would Barney Fife be?

Objectivist Roundup

If you missed it over the weekend, head over to Reason Pharm.

Ramirez on Obama

Looking for one cartoon, I found the other...

This weekend, HBL transcribed a Michael Ramirez editorial cartoon on Obama's proposal for medical insurance "reform." In the cartoon, the below lines are shown being stated by the President.

Government can fix health care.

Just look at Medicare and Medicaid.

Okay, they're broke, but look at Social Security.

Okay, it's broke, but look at the U.S. Post Office.

Okay, it's broke, but look at Amtrak.

Okay, it's broke, but look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Okay, they're broke, but look at my budget.

Okay, it's $1.6 trillion in the red, but ...

I could not easily find a link directly to that cartoon, but while I was looking, I did find one to another cartoon that was a hoot: "The Obama Health Care Plan in a Nutshell."

Update: Both Brad Harper and Flibbert emailed me later with permalinks directly to the first cartoon.

Professor Proven Right

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education details the "Kafkaesque" -- and inexcusable -- treatment of a college professor after he correctly raised concerns about his university's sexual harassment policy.

[East Georgia College professor Thomas] Thibeault's ordeal started shortly after August 5, 2009 when, during a faculty training session regarding the college's sexual harassment policy, he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, "what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?" Vice President for Legal Affairs Mary Smith, who was conducting the session, replied that there was no such provision to protect the accused, so Thibeault responded that "the policy itself is flawed."

Two days later, Thibeault, in violation of his academic freedom and the college's due process rules, was pressured to resign under threat of being fired for a "history" of sexual harassment. A month later, the college is backpedaling and he still has not been told about the charges made against him under that policy.

Regardless of Thibeault's actual past conduct, it is clear that the policy, as it exists at his college, is ripe for abuse.

Read the whole thing.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Added updates to Values Voter and cartoon sections. (2) Corrected an attribution.

Humanizing the "Forgotten Man"

I wasn't planning to post today, but I just read Paul Hsieh's superb Pajamas Media column against socialized medicine, and must stop what I am doing to recommend it.

Here is just a sample:

Finally, physicians are concerned that universal health care will compromise their ability to practice according to their own best judgment and conscience.

President Obama's "stimulus package" included $1 billion for "comparative effectiveness research" in health care. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor Martin Feldstein noted that the government's eventual goal is to use this research to cut costs and ration medical care by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt" and by "directly targeting individual providers ... (and other) high-end outliers."

In other words, your doctor would be rewarded if he practiced according to federal guidelines and punished if he strayed too far from them. Such guidelines must necessarily be based on statistical averages that cannot take into account specific facts of individual patients. But good physicians must consider precisely these specifics when treating their patients.

If you have abdominal pain due to gallstones, who should decide whether medication or surgery would be "most effective" for you? The doctor who felt your abdomen, heard your heart murmur, saw your ultrasound, and knows your drug allergies? Or the bureaucrat who got his job by telling the right joke to the right person at the right Washington cocktail party?

Too many Americans, in large part because of generations of populist class warfare campaigns, see doctors, not as fellow human beings who have to work for a living, but as stingy, elitist opportunists who arbitrarily withhold a vital service in between rounds of golf.

Hsieh's column calmly and methodically eviscerates that myth and the unjust moral evaluation that goes along with it, while at the same time showing how Barack Obama's egalitarian campaign to impose slavery on physicians would, if successful, ruin our prospects of getting good medical care.

Obama and other pro-slavery politicians can get away with this only so long as all most people can see is the golf -- but not the difficult decision process inherent in the job, or the frustration of dealing with bureaucrats, or the poor morale Hsieh points out.

Collectivists of all stripes often take advantage of demonization by stereotype to make oppression of one group or another possible, but they cannot get away with it when a column like this walks the reader through the mind experiment of walking a mile in the other person's moccasins.

If I mentioned Paul Hsieh's work as much here as it deserved, I'd barely write about anything else. Go read the whole thing now, and tell others about it.

-- CAV

Domestic Devo

I'm the cook and launderer of the family. The former is because I enjoy cooking and the latter is because I'm organized enough to work doing the laundry into my routine without really noticing it -- and better, if I say so myself, about remembering to do it. I do have my limits: I delegate hanging anything on a drying rack and any ironing to Mrs. Van Horn. At any rate, I sometimes play off the term "domestic diva" and jokingly refer to myself as a "domestic devo."

Today, I'm kicking off the first of many changes I'll be gradually making to the blog. More on that, perhaps, in a post headed your way in the near future. (I don't know myself what they all are, yet.) Suffice it to say that for some time, I have been kicking the idea around of reserving Friday for posting about things I enjoy. I don't know about always doing this, but I think this will frequently be the case.

So, without further ado, I present a recipe I tried recently, showing off my culinary version of a chemistry set along the way. Part of it is pictured at right. (Yes. I re-bottled and labeled my spices after I found nice, glass bottles for that rack.) More on that below, but first, here is my "cleaned up" version of a really nice chicken jambalaya I made for the first time on Labor Day weekend.

***

Chicken Jambalaya

Preparation Time is about an hour, ignoring marination of one hour.

Ingredients (List: cjm)

3 chicken breasts
salt
pepper
white wine, dry, 1 cup
1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 yellow onion
minced garlic, at least 1 tbsp
smoked sausage, 1 lb
1 green bell pepper
celery, 3 stalks
Tony Chachere's seasoning, 2 tsp
salt, 1/2 tsp
cayenne pepper, 1/4 tsp
Kitchen Bouquet (or similar gravy base), 1 tbsp
water, 4 cups
rice, 2 cups
chopped parsley, 1/2 cup (fresh, if possible)

Directions

1. Dice the chicken or cut into nugget-sized slices.

2. Salt and pepper the sliced chicken.

3. Marinate the chicken for an hour in white wine and Worcestershire sauce.

4. Chop the onion and set it aside in a large bowl with the garlic.

5. Thinly slice the smoked sausage.

6. In parallel with the next step, brown the sausage in a large pot over medium-high heat until slices are charred around the edges.

7. Slice the bell pepper and the celery, placing them in the bowl with the onion.

8. Set sausage aside on paper towel.

9. Brown chicken in sausage drippings.

10. Place chicken in bowl with sausage.

11. Dump chopped vegetables into pot.

12. "Sweat" the vegetables until tender: Over medium-high heat, cook covered for five minutes, stir, then cook for another five minutes.

13. Add the meat and the water to the pot, then turn heat to high.

14. Mise en place: Tony Chachere's, salt, and cayenne in a dish; a tablespoon and the gravy base; and the rice.

15. At boiling, add gravy base, spices, and rice. Return to boil if necessary.

16. Simmer, covered, on low heat for 20 minutes.

17. Stir in parsley and cover for one or two minutes.

Notes

1. If preparing in advance, add fresh parsley just before serving to avoid discoloration.

***

Just to reiterate, I only very slightly modified the above recipe. I would not say that it is my recipe.

But do take a look at the original and notice that the directions seem to occupy one, undivided, hard-to-follow-when-you're-cooking paragraph. I say, "seem to" because some of the directions are implied in the (rather lengthy) ingredients list, which is a great way to set yourself up to forget, say, chopping something up, only to ruin your timing in the middle of making the dish. It's also a great way to miss opportunities to do things more efficiently, as I do in steps 5-7, where I do some of my chopping while the sausage cooks. I do this with any recipe I like enough to want to make later. (And here, I managed to guess good amounts of spices to use, so I incorporated those guesses into the recipe.)

Many other avid chefs might be laughing at me right now, since timing is something one develops with experience, but my spelling everything out has the advantage that I can hand this to my wife, who is an organizational disaster in the kitchen -- She'll back me up on this! -- and have it turn out well. Whether I'm doing the actual cooking or not, I spend less time on the repetitive process of cooking and more on the creation and enjoyment of the food. This is especially true when I'm cooking something I haven't made in a while.

I do other things, too, like list the ingredients (and amounts) in the order that they appear, and I dump the ingredients into a text file -- a master shopping list for all my recipes and other grocery shopping. Each line is marked by a three-letter symbol for the recipe, making the list searchable by recipe (as well as sortable by store section and item), so I can just throw in a few search terms to generate a checklist for the store.

If all I were doing was making chicken jambalaya, such a list would look like this after I searched the file for the term "cjm" and removed the columns containing that search term:

cooking -[ ]- 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
cooking -[ ]- Kitchen Bouquet (or similar gravy base), 1 tbsp
grain ---[ ]- rice, 2 cups
meat ----[ ]- 3 chicken breasts
meat ----[ ]- smoked sausage, 1 lb.
produce -[ ]- green bell pepper
produce -[ ]- yellow onion
produce -[ ]- celery, 3 stalks
produce -[ ]- minced garlic, 1 heaping tablespoon
spice ---[ ]- cayenne pepper, 1/4 tsp
spice ---[ ]- chopped parsley, 1/2 cup (fresh, if possible)
spice ---[ ]- pepper
spice ---[ ]- salt
spice ---[ ]- Tony Chachere's seasoning, 2 tsp
spirits -[ ]- white wine, dry, 1 cup

(I see that I should make that, "chicken breasts, 3" the next time I edit that list... This is still a work in progress.)

You could, of course, just take a printout of the recipe to the store, but I like to do my grocery shopping just once or twice a week, so I usually do several searches and dump all the (sorted) results into one file. That, I print out at home, check off whatever I have, and then buy what's left at the store. Less drudgery. Less wasted time.

And speaking of time, I have other things to attend to this morning, so I'll have to skip the details of my spiffy spice inventory scheme. We'll just have to say I seem to have recovered nicely from the moving-induced shock of no longer having acres and acres of kitchen space and a place to cook outdoors: When it comes time to don the chef's apron, I'm enjoying myself again.

-- CAV

Updates

9-19-09: Corrected a typo.

Dating Reality

In a post titled, "Go on a Date with Life" over at Lifehack, Dustin Wax draws an interesting analogy between dating and life, drawing from six guidelines about dating in particular to create a list of tips for life in general. (He plans on revisiting this topic for more such tips in a later post.)

I find the analogy especially thought-provoking because dating is, like the rest of life, goal-directed action that ought to be directed towards one's self-interest. However, because it inherently involves finding companionship, the partial focus on other people can make it easier than in other pursuits to allow bad philosophical premises such as altruism or their psychological manifestations, such as second-handedness, to derail oneself. In addition, the move from dating to life underscores the fact that many people don't work as hard for themselves as they do for other people.

Why do some people find dating "traumatic?" I think that not only can one be afflicted with an inappropriate (i.e., more or less self-less) desire for approval from others, the eventual outcome still rests partially on the other person, whose potential value furthermore one can also, perhaps confuse with her actual value.

And, on the other hand, since our culture offers moral guidance overwhelmingly pertinent only to serving others, how well one treats oneself commonly takes a back seat to how well one treats others.

With those things in mind, I'll offer some thoughts Wax's list provoked from me, and invite other comments from those interested. In the below list, the title to Wax's tip will be in bold, and my thought will follow in normal type. If you want his elaborations, visit the post.

1. Dress Counts. This is true, because dress can be both a celebration of one's own aesthetic sense, and a nonverbal means of communication. Why not look as good as one can when one can? Why not understand the "grammar" of fashion well enough to use it to help convey one's actual value (e.g., seriousness or creativity) to others? One's self-interest is served by trading with other rational people. So, let them know -- if they have the (desirable) ability to see it -- that you are worth being better acquainted with by showing them that you are rational and tasteful.
2. Listen more, talk less. In likening dating to life, the focus here is on establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships that are of high mutual benefit. Either you'll get your chance to show what you have to offer or you'll be able to discover that it's time to move on. So learn as much as you can about the other person in the meantime.
3. Don't be too needy. Wax supplies an excellent movie quote: "Desperation is the worst perfume." Not to detract from that point, but to add another. I suspect that the source of much desperation in dating is an inappropriately or prematurely high valuation of the other person. Don't get too excited too soon, and for goodness's sake, listen to input and take it if it's rational, but never let other people hold your evaluation of yourself hostage.
4. Be decisive. Know what you want and the decisions will take care of themselves.
5. Smile a lot. I think that, to the extent this can help one put oneself and the other person at ease, the idea has merit. I differ in that happiness must come from within. That said, success on any level, even just finding a new, friendly acquaintance, will make you smile on its own.
   
6. Have an exit strategy. The analogy between dating and life breaks down a little here, but Wax's advice amounts to knowing what one wants enough to know whether a given undertaking is worth one's effort and, if so, how much effort.

Quite an interesting article. I wonder what he'll come up with on his next round.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 467

How to Work a Crowd

Over at Lifehacker is an interesting and mercifully short video about the above topic.

One point speaker Alexis Bauer keeps making is the value of familiarity in such situations, and she describes a way to begin building familiarity in a crowd where it does not yet exist.

Based on some experience I had at a recent networking event, I think she's got a point. (I had not seen this video yet.) My time was very productively spent in part because some people who were there recognized me -- thanks to my Texas accent -- from a previous such event and came over and started talking to me.

Next time, I think I'll try for even more of this "friend" effect as Bauer calls it by "seeding" the crowd. In the meantime, I remain amused and pleasantly surprised that something I considered a liability in the Northeast may sometimes be an advantage.

He'll get the memo, but will he get the memo?

I don't know, but Michael Steele will soon have a note from his boss waiting in his mailbox.

Republicans have outspent Democrats for almost half a century; they dealt the killing blow to the gold standard, imposed price controls, meddled ceaselessly with the monetary system, and expanded the welfare state. It is primarily Republicans who have ushered religion into government affairs and legislation. Republicans are behind compulsory health insurance, corporate bailouts, TARP, funding of religious groups, and the prescription drug bill. Republicans have prosecuted a weak and sacrificial war, putting our fathers and sons in harm's way not to crush an enemy but to hand out food. With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

I heard recently that regular mail gets more attention than email. I certainly hope that's true.

All Net

I enjoyed Joseph Kellard's recent tribute to Michael Jordan.

Sports fans know all too well the anti-individualist bromide: "There's no 'I' in 'team.'" Well, Jordan challenged such so-called wisdom. During his speech, he told a story about one of his coaches. "I could never please Tex ... I can remember a game ... we were down five or 10 points, and I go off for about 25 points and we come back and win the game. And we're walking off the floor and Tex looked at me and said, 'You know, there's no 'I' in 'team.' I said, 'Tex, there's no 'I' in 'team,' but there's 'I' in 'win.'"

Read the whole thing, especially if you've read some of the coverage of Jordan's recent Hall of Fame induction ceremony and, as I did, felt disappointment at the anti-individualist, anti-hero slant.

Principles

I am glad to see that Amit Ghate once again appears at Pajamas Media. This time, he argues that Americans must re-embrace individual rights as the guiding principle of government:

Contrary to today's pundits, we don’t have to resign ourselves to more of the same in politics. With the principle of individual rights to guide us, bold solutions to our problems are possible. Indeed, with it as their guide, the Founders overcame enormous obstacles to create the greatest nation in history. We can too. All it takes is to recommit to the principle.

I like his appeal to the reader's rational self-interest. You can go on all day saying that freedom is necessary for man's life and fail to change anyone's mind. Instead of doing that, this piece comes as close as a short op-ed can get to showing how you might come to realize that and that it is true.

Very nice work.

-- CAV

Sea of Confusion

Caleb Crain of the New Yorker discusses three books about pirates that consider their history as well as their economic and moral motivations. The essay reminds me somewhat of a similar look at so-called ghetto capitalism by Patrick Radden Keefe as he reviewed some of the work of economist Sudhir Venkatesh.

The essay differs in that it is written from a leftish perspective. Or at least it seems to be, based on its reports of how modern academics are evaluating this subject matter, as well as its apparent acceptance of common misconceptions about selfishness and capitalism. In particular, there seems a flimsier grasp than Keefe's of the nature of capitalism as well as a marked tendency to romanticize the pirates for their altruism.

Perhaps the below passage -- occurring a little after the author reports that, "the idea that pirates are in some way dissident, rather than merely criminal, entered the mainstream" -- most efficiently illustrates these weaknesses. According to Peter T. Leeson's The Republic of Pirates:

[T]here was a sound economic basis for all this democracy. Most businesses suffer from what economists call the "principal-agent problem": the owner doesn't work [sic], and the workers, not being stakeholders, lack incentives [sic]; so a certain amount of surveillance and coercion is necessary to persuade Ishmael to hunt whales instead of spending all day in his hammock with Queequeg. Pirates, by contrast, having stolen the ships they sailed, were both principals and agents; they still needed a captain but, Leeson explains, "they didn't require autocratic captains because there were no absentee owners to align the crew's interests with." The insight suggests more than Leeson seems to want it to -- does inequity always entail political repression? -- and late in the book he backtracks, cautioning that the pirate example "doesn't mean democratic management makes sense for all firms," only that management style should be adjusted to the underlying ownership structure. But a certain kind of reader is likely to ignore the hedging, and note that the pirates, two centuries before Lenin, had seized the means of production.

The means of production?!?! Who knew that all those so-called "merchant" ships were really, in fact, floating factories/mines/farms? A "certain kind of reader" might think that the captains of industry don't work, and that stealing is the same thing as producing, but that kind of reader doesn't know what he is talking about.

Any decent manager knows that it takes more than brute force to produce wealth. It takes brain power: to understand what others are willing to pay for, to know how to bring those values into existence, and to know how to organize the effort necessary to create and transport the tangible goods or services. It also takes freedom from threats -- such as those posed by pirates -- that the fruits of one's effort will be taken away by force.

And anyone who has any realistic idea of what it would take to fend for himself in the wild can appreciate the great bounty made possible by division of labor, physical and intellectual: Trade among free individuals creates greater wealth than all, alone and not trading, can produce. Not only is wealth not a fixed "pie" that exists by magic only to be divvied up and consumed, but it is continually created by and sustains civilized people because of their rational effort, which voluntary trade and intelligent management coordinates. Trade and theft are completely different phenomena. An employee who can't see that he is, in fact, a "stakeholder" in a capitalist system simply does not understand the trader principle.

The review, probably following the lead of the source material, refers to the economic system of the colonial period as "capitalism," but like other analyses (e.g., of "ghetto 'capitalism'"), this is not accurate. If capitalism is, "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights," then how is a system that includes slavery capitalism? The economic system of those times was freer than many, and it did have elements of capitalism, but it was a mixed economy.

This fact leads us to one of the more interesting passages in the essay, in which we see that to the (very) limited extent pirates did act in their rational self-interest, some of them partially grasped what was wrong with slavery. (Others did own slaves, however.)

Though some pirates kept slaves and others traded in them, blacks composed a quarter to a third of some pirate crews, and on some ships they bore arms, had voting rights, and shared the booty. Leeson proposes that pirates had an economic incentive to treat blacks as equals instead of keeping them as slaves. Prejudice needlessly deprives a business of skilled labor, he points out. Also, while the benefit of a slave would be diluted among a pirate crew, the potential cost would not be: an embittered slave who betrayed a pirate ship could cost every pirate his whole neck.

This is interesting, and shows the strengths and weaknesses of cost-benefit analysis all at once. Some pirates saw the foolishness of slavery, but, as looters, remained on the run from the law and bound to a collective. (That the black pirates in such scenarios faced the "alternative" of slavery does not damn capitalism. Rather, it shows that the governments of the time, in failing to respect individual rights, were not capitalist.)

Despite my reservations, I found the article quite thought-provoking, particularly when it showed both modern pirates and those of old claiming altruistic "justifications" for their actions. In the past, some held Robin Hood up as the moral ideal. Today, Somalian pirates claim moral superiority on altruistic grounds more in tune with today's enthusiasms, where the earth is "the other": "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas."

Crain asks whether pirates are socialists or capitalists. That's a good question to ask, but cost-benefit anaylsis is too limited a tool to answer that question. As a minimal first step, one has to define moral and political terms to answer that with any clarity.

Let's review what we know here. Pirates "justify" theft on altruistic grounds. They reject the trader principle. They do not respect individual rights. So what if they make an occasional cost-benefit analysis? One can not remain alive by consistently practicing altruism or collectivism, so altruists and collectivists are necessarily inconsistent hypocrites.

My answer? Pirates are anything but capitalists -- and it's not a good thing that they aren't.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Added link to article from New Yorker. (HT: Chuck) (2) Clarified last ending.

Quick Roundup 466

Astroturf

Pictured below is what the Obama Administration and its allies in Congress mean when they use the term "astroturf."


How else could they explain one or two million people being so interested in "bickering" that they'd show up in DC on a weekend?

Many leftists do not see their opinions as opinions, but merely what any decent, reasonably intelligent person would want with a modicum of thought. This protest may help defeat Obama's physician slavery initiative, but, partially for this reason, it will do nothing to make the Democrats re-think their agenda or understand normal Americans any better.

We have to hope that enough Democrats in Congress appreciate the size of these crowds and want power enough to be willing to cave to save their seats: Obama has at least one trick up his sleeve that we already know about.

Ammunition

Regarding short-term ways Americans can stop the onslaught of socialism, I am glad to see that the September 12 Tea Party in Washington was a success, but in the long term, Americans must generally become refamiliarized with the idea that the government exists only to protect individual rights, and made aware that acting for one's self-interest is, in fact, morally good.

And what of the medium-term? Two collections of articles, one about the War We Should Be Fighting and one about physician slavery, will -- if they are made more widely known -- both help effect the necessary long-term cultural change (by applying such principles to current debates) and influence the current political debate for the better.

Making Lemonade with a Business Card

Fans of The Office, this one's for you!

I'm late to this party, but the above video, as Time noted in April, went viral, and it has generated millions of views. According to pitchman Joel Bauer's web site, he was just acting in the video, but its web presence has generated substantial business for him despite making him look ridiculous.

Objectivist Roundup

The latest version is being hosted by C. August at Titanic Deck Chairs.

Well, Okay. One More.

Also culled from the comments to the above Bauer video: "Time to up the ante. Not one but two sites chock full of innovative, creative & just plain weird business card designs. There's something here for everyone."

-- CAV

MY Blue Sky

Last year, I was unable to pay my respects to those who were murdered today in 2001 in the way that I had wanted because I was fleeing from a storm that eventually hit where I was living at the time.

This year, I find that my country faces a different storm no less threatening and from which physical avoidance will not deliver us. Fortunately, it is humanly possible to blunt the effects of this man-made storm in other ways. The Enemy-in-Chief may, for example, be doubling down on his attempts to impose servitude on our physicians and their patients en route to "taking care" of the rest of us, but America has successfully resisted tyranny before, and we can do it again.

The issue over which these battles are being fought -- the individual's inalienable moral and political right to lead his own life free from threats and coercion from others -- is the same. Only the methods of fighting differ. But as we fight to survive, we stop for a moment to mourn those who were murdered that day, and take a moment to consider how precious being alive and free really is.

It is from that perspective that I write today. After a living thing is injured, it begins to heal. I am no less angry about what the Islamic savages did then on the way to squandering their own lives, and no less resolved that we must eventually wage a merciless war against the countries that made what they did possible.

However, time has made me better able to enjoy again the simple pleasure of a blue sky like the one I saw that morning just before I heard the news. I have noticed that I no longer am immediately reminded of those attacks whenever I see one.

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.

The last three sentences are almost word for word what I thought upon waking today. Knowing what anniversary loomed, I'd spent some time yesterday evening reading about the events and their perpetrators, but that is what I woke up thinking about instead.

The feeling was all mine, but something about the formulation seemed eerily familiar. As it turns out, some digging shows that the words echo the following passage near the end of Ayn Rand's novella, Anthem, after its protagonist rediscovers the word that America's enemies would like to abolish forever.

I AM. I THINK. I WILL.

My hands... My spirit... My sky... My forest... This earth of mine ....

What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!"

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the load-stone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before! (111)

And that is the answer.

I will never forget that day or forgive anyone who lent those atrocities aid or comfort in any way, but they have not vanquished my soul. And yes, we Americans are in great danger from many fronts. We must fight the scourge of tyranny, whatever its source, vigilantly and without compromise. That is vitally important, but on one level, doing so is as significant as swatting flies: You just do it and you get on with your life, because life is precious.

I can enjoy my blue sky again. Thank you once again, Ayn Rand!

-- CAV

Flu Season

The flu is on my mind after Mrs. Van Horn reminded me yesterday that immunization time is nigh and, so, of course, I wondered about the swine flu pandemic.

Hadley Leggett of Wired Science reported about a month ago that history indicated that the flu would probably not turn out to be as bad as many had feared.

[T]wo infectious disease experts from the National Institutes of Health question the idea that severe pandemics are usually preceded by a milder wave of disease. After analyzing 15 pandemics from the last 500 years, including the catastrophic influenza pandemic of 1918, they say the pattern doesn't hold up.

And yesterday, Sandy Szwarc of Junkfood Science took a look at how actual numbers compared to projections in Australia, which is near the end of its flu season.

Three months ago, public health experts and even the President of the Australian Medical Association were warning that one-third of the population would get swine flu. As late as last month, the Australian government had ordered 21 million doses of swine flu vaccine, enough to vaccinate the entire population.

In reality, as of noon today, the Australian Department of Health and Ageing reports that Australia has had 35,775 confirmed cases of pandemic H1N1. The experts had overstated the numbers who would get sick by 203-fold. There have been 162 deaths -- a fraction (5.4%) of the 3,000 Australians who typically die from the seasonal flu each year.

Curious about whether the low numbers might be attributable in any way to a vaccination program, I found only reports, dated August 20, that Australia might start vaccinations some time this month. Szwarc goes on to note that the flu has not only been less virulent than feared, but has produced a relatively mild illness, quoting an infectious disease expert as saying, "If we have to have influenza, I would clearly choose novel H1N1."

So far, the worst fears have failed to materialize. That's good to hear, but I will likely take the second vaccine anyway. If the vaccine proves to be safe, why get sick at all?

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Despite that news, it's not quite time to exhale: Via Glenn Reynolds, it appears that members of certain ethnicities (e.g., "young Canadian aboriginals") may get hit really hard.

Quick Roundup 465

The Illusion of Control

While taking a look around Lifehacker this morning, I ran across a link to a very interesting look inside the manipulative world of car salesmanship.

"Good. Now you drive."

"Me?"

"Yeah. You be Mr. Customer. You get behind the wheel. See, you got to be in control on the demo. Because when you get back to the lot, you got to get them in the box and make a deal."

I will note that, yes, car sales is a legitimate occupation, and that, yes, there are plenty of honest car salesmen out there.

But we also live in a corrupt culture, where people have been trained from an early age not to put two and two together, and people are more often than not in the habit of allowing emotions to guide their lives. Unsurprisingly, many of the techniques car salesmen use turn out to be designed to take advantage of these facts.

For example, many people are not in the habit of integrating what they know, making them easy to distract by the "four-square" method of describing a car deal:

The opening numbers were now in place on the 4-square. At a glance, Michael said, you could see the significant numbers of this deal -- purchase price of the car, trade-in, down payment and the monthly payments. As you negotiated you could move from box to box, making progress as you went. It allowed you to sell a car in different ways. For example, if the customer was determined to get full value for his trade-in, you could take extra profit elsewhere -- in the purchase price or maybe even in financing.

Add to this various ways to distract or pressure the customer ("The car is still available!" Like they didn't make more than one.), and you have numerous opportunities to prevent him from negotiating a lower price. (And this is all on top of the fact that even without all the manipulation, most customers simply do not know about all aspects of a car deal, while the salesmen make such deals on a daily basis.)

Fascinating stuff. The essential goal of the dishonest tactics (including a rare few that are borderline criminal) appears to me to be to prevent the customer from seeing the deal clearly and, in doing so, to get him to cede control of the sale to the car dealer. This is aided greatly by the salesman's crafting the illusion that the customer has actually maintained control of the situation.

Note to Self

And speaking of Lifehacker, I might want to try tip number 9 from this list for boosting my wireless signal. No. We don't have a patio, but the router that worked perfectly throughout our much bigger house in Houston gives rather dodgy signal strength to the room adjacent to the office where the router lives here.

So... That's still going on.

There's an article at Pajamas Media about a speech tic I remember from my days in grad school.

So .. here's a question: Have you noticed that tech workers start a lot of their sentences with the word, "So…?"

Is it just me? Because I started to notice this around 1997 or so, when dot com companies started gaining in stature, importance, and wealth.

Tech veterans, recent hires, even people who left other careers to jump on the tech bandwagon would answer questions starting with the word "so." As in, "So, what we do is strictly B-to-B," or, "So .. I can't tell you much about our upcoming release, except that it will radically change the way business is done."

Our program included a seminar series where each of us would take turns, on successive weeks, describing our research progress to our peers. Since this was meant to help us improve our presentation skills, we had to write critiques of our peers, for their eyes, when it wasn't our turn to present.

This "so" problem was so bad that I started tallying how many times a sentence would start with "so" and include the total with some of my critiques. I once logged more than seventy before I quit counting during one hour-long lecture.

At the time, I attributed the problem to people in one wing of a research building being influenced due to frequently interacting with a favorite investigator who had the habit, and I haven't heard much of it since, but apparently, my sample size was too small!

So ... perhaps I was wrong!

Good Fences (and Good Walls, and Good Curtains) Make Good Neighbors

I haven't thought much about the narcissistic aspect brought up by the article, but I would certainly expect that part of "How Facebook Ruins Friendships" is by eroding healthy psychological boundaries.

I don't have a Facebook account, but I found this interesting nonetheless.

Heh!

On a recent visit to 3 Ring Binder, I discovered that I'd forgotten all about Ted Kennedy's recent expiry.

Upon driving by a highway sign in Massachusetts that read, "THANKS TED (next screen) THE PEOPLE OF MASS," LB notes that, "I have been not only included without my consent, but also made to pay the bill for the public display."

Well put!

And that pretty much nails it -- good and shut -- as far as I'm concerned, too.

Objectivist Roundup

LB also reminded me that I forgot to link to the latest installment. I'm nearly a week late, but I'm not letting that stop me!

-- CAV

Pot, Meet Kettle!

Through Progressive Revival, a religious left blog hosted at Beliefnet, comes an amusing and instructive article accusing America's Roman Catholic bishops of being "cafeteria Catholics."

To set the context for the following explanation of what a "cafeteria Catholic" is, the article notes that, generally, America's Catholic bishops tend to take theocratic stands on the so-called "social issues," and yet sound (at least to its author) more like fiscal conservatives at other times (e.g., They do not get behind major expansons of the welfare state, like physician slavery.):

"Cafeteria Catholics" is a term often used by conservatives to describe members of the church who are not in alignment with Church teaching on every issue. Using this term, conservatives claim that liberals are too willing to pick and choose which teachings they will follow.

Fair enough, and author Paul Gorrell has a point here, too.

But conservatives overlook the reality that the Catholic Church has a very liberal social teaching that places the dignity of the person at its core. This influences the way the Church teaches about aid to the poor, economic justice within taxation systems, and universal health care. Since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the Church has formally taught that a social approach to health care was necessary to ensure equal access for all. The burden of providing health care to everyone belonged to the society at large. Catholic Social Ethics has further developed this notion since the Council and consistently articulated support for universal health care within society.

A recent papal encyclical should remove any doubts about the accuracy of the above, although it hasn't in some quarters.

Where the article gets amusing for a moment is where Gorrell, clearly on the moral offensive, decides to go in for the kill. [For some possible amusement at the expense of yours truly, see the Note below.]

It's important to realize that the official teaching on marriage in the Catholic Church has been written by men who have never been married. These men also teach that birth control can never be used by a married couple. Aside from the fact that much of the official teaching of the Church contradicts the understanding of healthy sexuality within the field of modern psychology, it is stunning that those whom the Church authorizes to speak on these topics have often defended, hidden, or participated in a system of sexual abuse that highlights their own deeply disordered relationship with human sexuality. [bold added]

The implied call for his church to adopt a more reasoned approach to sexuality would be laudable were it not made ridiculous at the outset by the fact that not half a minute ago, Gorrell was chiding these very bishops for failing to adhere to the Church's economic teachings. Add to this difficulty the fact that these economic teachings suffer a defect similar to that of the sexual mores he skipped over during his own pass at the buffet: They were also originated by men who did not make a completely rational study of man and his nature before formulating them, much less ever got around to proving the existence of God.

But that's just a quick laugh. Note several things here: (1) Gorrell is the more consistent altruist, and as such, is more in tune with the moral principles of his faith on economic matters. His side will eventually win any debate (such as there can be) on "economic justice" within his religion because... (2) Such debates are circumscribed by certain arbitrary premises that all its members will never examine because they accept them on faith. (3) Any follower of his religion, whose ethical code demands that man act against the requirements of his own nature, must necessarily be of the "cafeteria" variety. (4) This fact makes the inevitable guilt a valuable psychological weapon for anyone participating in that sordid debate. Read on.

With Barack Obama's reinvigoration of his opposition, there are and will be calls for the "next Reagan" and other such attempts to revive the "alliance" between theocrats and individualists. Now the article becomes instructive, because such an alliance would concern us with debates like this and their likely outcome.

Catholic Bishops in the United States, however, have opposed universal health care out of fear that abortion will be included in whatever bill that Congress might pass. Instead of proudly stating the Catholic tradition on universal health care and then demanding that abortion be excluded from public option benefits, the Catholic bishops have started from a place of opposition and, in so doing, failed to uphold a core social teaching of the Church.

This is not the only reason to avoid making such a mistake again, but one look at the basis for some of Obama's "opposition" should show that such calls are ill-advised.

--CAV

Note: Paul Gorrell, or someone claiming to be him, informs me that he is actually no longer a Catholic. This sounds plausible to me, but I cannot presently confirm it one way or the other.

Updates

Today Added a Note.