Before You Inject Those 'Peptides!...'

Until we see the day that the FDA is dismantled and replaced by a number of competing, credible private watchdog groups, standards bodies, or something like a Consumers Union or Underwriters Laboratories, it will be what practically everyone relies upon for guidance about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

This is part of why having a single government agency is so dangerous to your health: It's a single point of failure that can be made to fail by politicians -- as it is doing so today under Donald Trump, through his reckless appointment of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. as the head of the HHS.

Case in point: Kennedy is working to give the FDA's imprimatur to a number of fashionable nostrums:

RFK Jr is trying to get 14 peptides, without data on safety or efficacy, licensed and approved by FDA. His favorite is BPC-157. "Only three small human studies of BPC-157 exist, for instance, the largest of which is a telephone survey of 16 people who received an injection of the drug for knee pain, and which was published in a third-tier journal, Alternative Therapies."

Regulars here will know that I am both an advocate of one's freedom to use oneself as a guinea pig if one wants and a proponent of making informed decisions about such things.

So it is that, since "peptides" are all the rage these days, I was glad to see Derek Lowe, a research chemist, write about this fad and how dangerous it can be.

After first giving a good general introduction to the scientific meaning of the term peptide in his trademark relatable and humorous way, Lowe gets into the nitty-gritty of using them as therapies, including a discussion of a treatment that is often abused:

And there are going to be plenty of cases where yes, Peptide X sure does do that thing you're interested in, but it turns out that you can't do That Thing without doing other things that you are surely not interested in. A number of "peptides of abuse" these days, for example, seem to be targeting human growth hormone pathways and associated ones, so let's use that as an example. The pitch is often something like "Here's the signal your body uses to build muscle! Take it directly and get going today!", and with HGH there's also been a longstanding subculture that treats it as a Fountain of Youth signal of some kind. "Replenish your growth hormone levels", the idea is, "and dial back the biological clock!"

But growth hormone (and I shouldn't have to say this) is powerful stuff, and it doesn't just go tell your muscles to swell up. It affects bone tissue and many other tissues as well. I would invite anyone looking to maximize their growth hormone levels to look up a condition called acromegaly, which is what you get when your body keeps on making more growth hormone than you strictly need. Bones in the hands, feet, and head enlarge, and you get all sorts of side effects like joint pain, high blood pressure, type II diabetes, and other things that are probably not mentioned in the peptide supplier's brochure.

Excess growth hormone also increases the risk of some types of cancer... [bold added]

Lowe also notably gets into that fave of Bobby K Junior's, "BPC-157."

Lowe ends with his defense of the FDA, which I would heavily qualify as I did at the beginning of this post. To the extent that so many people rely on the FDA for information about drug efficacy and safety in the world as it is today, though, he is spot on.

Trump's appointment of Kennedy is dangerous for that reason and, in my view, is a reason we would work to build strong, competing, non-governmental institutions that inform the public about drug safety and efficacy.

-- CAV

Somin on Citizenship Reform

Ilya Somin writes provocatively on citizenship reform at The Volokh Conspiracy.

I found his piece worthwhile because, as he does, I oppose Trump's effort to oppose birthright citizenship, although I have long thought the United States needs immigration and citizenship reform.

Widespread confusion about the nature of civil rights vs. individual rights muddies this debate, as I noted years ago:

[I]t reminds me of a distinction Leonard Peikoff drew on his radio show some time ago between civil rights -- which belong to the citizens of a country and pertain to their participation in its government and legal system -- and individual rights -- which belong to anyone in a society. An example of a civil right would be the right to vote. Freedom of speech would be an example of an individual right (that a proper government would guard for its citizens).

The distinction is interesting to me because I suspect that in addition to the massive confusion there already is among the public about the nature of individual rights (e.g., from the philosophical roots of the concept to their very nature, as evidenced by the plethora of ersatz "rights," like medical care), there is further confusion about the distinction mentioned above. The most glaring instance I can think of where this confusion hampers intelligent debate is in the immigration debate, and specifically when the very idea of open immigration is equated with treating all comers as full citizens. [bold added]

Somin seems to have such a distinction in mind when he proposes (1) changing the ambit of citizenship to not include voting, and (2) making participation in the government, such as by voting, contingent on competence and revocable on such grounds as insurrection:

... In an ideal system, restrictions on voting and office-holding would be based on competence and (in some cases) there might be exclusions based on a demonstrated danger to liberal democratic institutions (as with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court wrongly gutted, to a large extent). We already have some competence-based constraints on the franchise, such as excluding children, some convicts, and immigrants who cannot pass a civics test most native-born Americans would fail if they had to take it without studying.

...

... the ideal political system would have a strong presumption against restrictions on migration, while also imposing competence-based constraints on voting rights and office-holding...

Somin also argues for restricted access to welfare benefits, which I can only advocate as a stopgap measure until the full repeal of the welfare state, as I have argued before.

I have not thought deeply about this nor am I a legal scholar, but I like these ideas and agree with Somin that, in the meantime, "Birthright citizenship [is] a second-best policy."

-- CAV

Freedom Four

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Killing Section 230 Would End Our Free Internet," by Agustina Vergara Cid (The Orange County Register):

The internet is far from perfect, however, and truly appalling and illegal things happen there. But Section 230 doesn't protect platforms from federal criminal law violations, the promotion or facilitation of sex trafficking, or intellectual property violations. Individual users can be held liable for their own behavior -- as in the case of defamation. It's not that this law takes liability away altogether, it just shifts liability away from the platform and back to the person who actually posted the content.

750 words/3 minutes

2. "Colleges Must Give Up Federal Funding to Achieve True Intellectual Freedom," by Onkar Ghate and Sam Weaver (The Hill, 2025):

Even in the best-case scenario, when federal bureaucrats try to proceed conscientiously, such a system creates increased conformity within an academic field. The bureaucrats will tend to defer to recognized experts in the field, which means established theories and methodologies are much more likely to receive federal support, making it difficult for intellectual minorities and innovators to compete. This plays out across the entire university, which is strongly incentivized to hire researchers likely to receive federal grants.

600 words/2 minute

3. "How Government Attempts to Reduce Health Spending Can Paradoxically Raise Health Costs," by Paul Hsieh (Forbes):

A more long-term answer would be to encourage the growth of free-market clinics such as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, that offer price transparency and work outside the traditional insurance system to provide quality care at lower cost. In the current heavily regulated US medical system, market-based reforms cannot fully address the problem -- but they would be a step in the right direction of rational pricing of medical services and procedures.

1000 words/4 minutes

4. "There Is No Imminent Infectious Disease Crisis at the Border," by Amesh Adalja and Agustina Vergara Cid (STAT):

Paradoxically, the administration whose health secretary wants to institute a "pause" on infectious disease research and expresses doubt regarding the germ theory of disease is now going to invoke infectious diseases as a threat.

700 words/2 minutes

-- CAV

Blind Spots Are Funny Things

A couple of posts by advice columnist Annie Lane that I would say fall under the umbrella of communicate clearly with your loved ones each reminded me of humorous interactions I have had with my wife and her family, and of why I regularly check a small list of advice columnists each week.

In the first of these, it would appear that an athlete has met his soulmate in the person of a couch potato, and asks, point-blank, Is it possible to build a lasting relationship when your passions and daily habits are so different, or is this a sign that we're not meant for each other?

Lane's answer is spot-on, although not something I ever needed to hear from someone else. My wife and I have always been open and clear with each other, and we each have tastes and pursuits not in common with the other that we're happy to see each other pursue, even as we find the other's choice baffling.

For example, my wife and her dad just love talking about real estate, and this interest extends to her looking at house listings as a kind of hobby. I enjoy looking at the events of the day from a philosophical perspective, and learned early in our relationship that she's apolitical and simply does not enjoy philosophical discussions. No big deal: I started a blog and have friends I can share that interest with.

Her interest in residential real estate became apparent to me later and over time, coming to a head in my bemusement some time around a move we had to make.

We've picked a place already. Why does she keep going on about this? I wondered, with a side of Oh God! I don't want to move again what is this? So I brought it up, learned that it was a kind of recreation for her, and was able to establish that I liked going into that only when necessary: "I find real estate about as interesting as you find philosophy." I told her.

Boundary established. She and her dad can be real estate buddies and I can leave the house talk to the bare minimum.

That communication issue was a non-issue for me. The one Annie Lane addressed in the second letter I found baffled me in the moment, but I solved it by accident.

In this post, someone is having trouble with wanting to establish different boundaries with her in-laws than her husband was used to. Her problem reminded me in part of an issue I had when my in-laws moved closer to us a few years ago:

There are also frequent "drop-ins." His parents live only 15 minutes away, and while I appreciate that they want to spend time together, there have been moments when they've shown up without calling first. I try to be gracious, but sometimes it feels like our home isn't fully our own. [bold added]

My case had the further complication that we each had keys to each others' homes to facilitate taking care of things when one family or the other was out of town.

I already was fumbling around for a polite way to ask my in-laws to give me notice before coming over for any reason when, one day, a trip by my father-in-law to return something took care of that for me.

I was at home alone mid-day, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw someone was in my house, that someone being my father-in-law.

"Please don't do that!" I blurted out spontaneously. "I nearly had a heart attack!"

Now, they always call ahead, and I feel silly for not having just asked in the first place.

The issue in the letter is a little bit different, but I like her answer, and it's in an area I'm a little "blind" in. I might have used similar advice were it not for that encounter, either by searching advice column archives or asking.

We can't always know our own blind spots, but it is possible to mitigate them by learning from the problems, big and small, that others face.

-- CAV

Florida Man vs. Right to Contract

Quick question: When is it proper for the government to tell a private employer whom he can hire, and how?

1. Any time that employer discriminates for or against anyone for reasons unrelated to fitness for the job as advertised, or
2. Never, because the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, including the right to contract.

Hint: Whatever other considerations an employer might have are moral matters, and an employer will bear the rewards or consequences (monetary or not) of those additional considerations.

The correct answer -- which apparently would come as a surprise to about 99% of today's government officials -- is 2.

The government has no business forcing employers to have hiring quotas or not to have them.

Florida is making the second mistake, in a knee-jerk reaction to decades of DEI/"corporate responsibility"/ESG:

The National Football League won't stop enforcing its "Rooney Rule" in the face of Florida's threats of possible legal action over the longstanding diversity hiring practice, league Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday.

Speaking at the NFL's annual meeting in Phoenix, Goodell said the league will "engage" with Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who last week warned the Rooney Rule and other similar hiring policies are "illegal" under Florida's civil rights laws. But Goodell maintained the NFL believes its rule is "consistent" with state laws and will continue to be used to help "bring in the best talent."

The "Rooney Rule" is an effort by the NFL, a private employer, to help individuals who are not white males get into coaching jobs.

Whatever its moral status -- or anyone's opinion about whether it's necessary or the right way to give such candidates a fair hearing -- it's up to the owners of the NFL whom they hire and how they go about doing so. It would be wrong for the government to force them to have such a rule (if they didn't already) for the same reason it is attempting to force them not to do so now.

This is not the first time Florida's conservative Governor, Ron DeSantis, has shown that he's more of a fascist than a proponent of free markets. During the pandemic, he made exactly the same kind of mistake regarding vaccine "mandates" when he threatened cruise lines for asking their passengers to vaccinate before cruises (!):

[DeSantis] has no more right than the CDC to impose a vaccination policy on a cruise line. Do not be fooled by the fact that his position differs in concrete detail from the one favored by the left.

It is interesting to note that after decades of the left "mandating" things via improper government, many people seem to have forgotten the fundamental difference between a business owner setting policy and the government doing it for him.

-- CAV

One Snake-Oil Vendor Calls out Another

The editorial board of the New York Post does a yeoman's job of totting up the many king-like past transgressions of Democrat Presidents against the Republic, in the wake of the most recent protests against Donald Trump.

A sample:

Obama lost, often at the Supreme Court. That didn't stop him.

Nor did it stop President Joe Biden, who became infamous for ignoring Supreme Court decisions.

When the Supreme Court said that extending a COVID-era moratorium on evictions would be unconstitutional, Biden just did it anyway.

The same when the Supremes told Biden he lacked the power to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt.

Democrats didn't protest against Biden acting like a king. In fact, they encouraged him to go even further.

The protestors, whose demonstrations notably included anti-American chants and flew flags of hostile regimes, well deserved to be called out for their inconsistencies.

On top of that, Americans are fairly warned:

So when it comes to "no kings," Dems aren't just accusing Trump -- they're falsifying their own history.

The truth is that Democrats cheer authoritarian behavior -- as long as they're in charge.

Let them back into power, and they'll prove it once again.

It is too bad that that is essentially the whole message, which evades the similar damage Donald Trump does to our Republic every day.

When two men sell poisonous snake oil, the fact that one calls out the other does not mean his product is any better, and yet that is the gist of this editorial.

In better days, the writers would be well aware of and open about the similarity, and of the alternative of working to free our nation from any and all tyrants. They would exhort their side to do better. The Founders, many Christian, for example, were well aware of the tyranny of religious authority -- and yet they did not squabble among themselves as to which religion to make official. They deprived all religions of secular power instead.

Today, there is no such exhortation, but to not "let them back into power," at a time when universal suffrage is under blatant attack and the leader being protested against openly undermines the legitimacy of past elections while working to rig future ones. This is dangerously close to endorsing a dictatorship, as, surely, one would keep the President's political enemies out of power, as if they all deserve to be.

The solution to the problem of a too-powerful Presidency isn't to stick with the proverbial devil you know or to make that devil even more powerful, but to work to exorcise imperial power from the Presidency so neither "side" can abuse it.

-- CAV

Good News/Bad News From a General

The good news/bad news about Iran overall is, of course, that we have a President willing to fight it -- but who may be too impulsive and incompetent to prosecute it to the right conclusion: a complete decimation of Iran's ability to harm our interests.

That latter emphatically includes the end of its current regime.

The crisis caused by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz epitomizes Trump's unfitness to lead this war, given that he plainly failed to account for that very possibility upon launching.

Fortunately, others have gamed out this scenario and, having done so, may yet save Trump's bacon. RealClear Politics summarizes an interview with a retired general on this point:

Retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, told CBS's "Face The Nation" that after years of preparation, after one month, the campaign against Iran is "further along than we would have expected to be at this point, in all the simulations that I've seen."

"This is not back-of-the-envelope calculations. These are things we've been working on for many years," he said. [bold added]

That's the good news. The bad follows in the very next paragraph:

"I believe that they will break. I believe that they will come to terms," he said. "I'll be honest with you. I've simulated this many years in many positions at Central Command; we're a little further along than we would have expected to be at this point in all the simulations that I've seen." [bold added]

In other words, for all our tactical superiority, we are crippled by an institutional strategic blindness to the nature of our opponent that feeds straight in to Trump's naive obsession with "making a deal" at all costs.

We fought World War II and prevailed in the Cold War against opponents that at least had a desire to live in this world. Those opponents were, in that respect, paragons of rationality compared to this foe. Unlike with them, there is no basis at all for negotiating with Iran's regime.

The current regime are religious fanatics for whom criminal bargains -- much less good faith negotiations for mutual benefit in the future -- are an alien concept, and who will lie through their teeth, if doing so will keep them in power, so they can regroup and try to kill us again another day.

-- CAV

Four Neat Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. I haven't had a library card in years, but I might get one after learning about two apps that use them for identification: Libby grants temporary, free (as in beer) access to ebooks and audiobooks, and Kanopy does the same for "classic cinema, indie film, and top documentaries."

2. Speaking of libraries, a German engineer would appear to have seen this hidden basement model railroad and raised it by 70,000 (!) books in his own hidden home library.

3. Every once in a while, I come across a list of highly-rated gadgets that I end up ratifying with my wallet. The latest is "65 Weird Things With Near-Perfect Reviews That Are Truly Life-Changing"

While I wouldn't exactly call any of these "life-changing," I like the car charger with the retractable cable, and I see two things my wife would appreciate, looking at it again.

One item I won't get, but which is neat are the "finger chopsticks" for snacking without getting dirty fingers.

I came up with the similar idea years ago of using plastic kiddie chopsticks for that very purpose, and told my kids to do that with Chee-tos and the like.

The item I see appears to require more effort than I'd like to completely free the hand of the chopstick.

4. Although I suspect that the kinds of jobs created by AI will mainly be of the non-obvious, things unseen type, not all of them will be -- or are.

You can go to Rentahuman right now and "get paid when agents need someone in the real world."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Luddites!

-- CAV

A Nice Debunking

A while back, Suzanne Lucas debunked a claim by one Megan Cornish to the effect that changing her LinkedIn profile to male effectively quadrupled her page views.

I always like a good debunking, but I particularly enjoyed how thoroughly ridiculous she made Cornish's claim look in light of her methodology:

So, it's entirely possible that it's purely a coincidence that her views increased by 400 percent for this week, where LinkedIn thought she was a man.

But she did two other things:

1. Ran her posts through ChatGPT and asked it to change the style to be like a man would write.

2. Asked ChatGPT to make her posts more "agentic."

When trying to isolate a problem, you want to eliminate as many variables as possible to focus on the one thing. By doing three things, it's impossible to tell what the issue is here.

There are many possibilities.

It's the gender swap. LinkedIn denies that its algorithm looks at gender at all, but I've also had LinkedIn employees tell me that adding an external link will not affect views. As a prolific LinkedIn poster, I don't believe that last one for a minute. It's possible that the gender change made a big difference. [bold in original]

Lucas starts with the most charitable possibility first, but she's just being thorough.

It's also the signal for her readers to make some popcorn, because Lucas goes on to consider five other possible explanations Cornish failed to consider or left her results open to by being sloppy.

This was a fun read, and a good blueprint for anyone to remember any time someone makes a broad, fashionable claim like Cornish's.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean "they" are out to get you. Or that they aren't.

-- CAV

Dumb Pitches Plan to Dumber

Donald Trump has pitched a 15-point peace plan to Iran through Pakistan.

Highlights of this plan reportedly include the following:

• A 30-day ceasefire.
• The dismantling of Iran's nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow.
• A permanent commitment from Iran to never develop nuclear weapons.
• The handover of Iran's stockpile of already enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a commitment from Iran to allow the IAEA to monitor all elements of the country's remaining nuclear infrastructure. Iran must also no longer enrich uranium within the country.
• Limits on the range and number of Iran's missiles.
• Ending Iran's support for regional proxies.
• Ending Iranian strikes on regional energy facilities.
• Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
• A removal of all sanctions imposed on Iran, alongside the ending of the UN mechanism that allows sanctions to be reimposed.
• The provision of US support for electricity generation at Iran's Bushehr civil nuclear plant.

Assuming the above is accurate and representative, I can summarize this in a question and two sentences:

• Have we learned anything since 1979?
• Every single item but one pertaining to what we'd like from Iran has already been tried, with Iran reneging at least once; and
• Reopening the Straight of Hormuz is the ace up Iran's sleeve it won't give up since it's the only card they have left.

Fortunately, we have the means to take that card by force.

Also fortunately, Iran's fanatic leadership would appear to be effectively even dumber than our President, who won't be able to make up for his lack of planning by simply declaring victory:

"Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you," Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the headquarters, said in the video statement aired on state television. "Not now, not ever."

Good! The lemon of facing an intransigent, brutish foe might yet become the lemonade of a victory Trump is too dimwitted to pursue on his own initiative, even though winning is within reach.

-- CAV

P.S. Trump's long track record of breaking agreements may also be helping here, for a change. Some reports call the Iranian leadership "skeptical" and cite the earlier nuke site bombings during negotiations as the reason for this suspicion.

Trump's War on Economic Reality Continues

Now that Trump has lost the Supreme Court case against his illegal IEEPA import taxes he is turning his attention to doubling down on his war against economic reality even as he attempts to shirk his duty to see out the one against Iran.

This time, the magical incantation he hopes will make the Constitution disappear lies in Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act.

The law will, he hopes, enable him to declare normal trading conditions "unfair" after his cronies "investigate" what they're calling "structural excess capacity" in global manufacturing.

The writers at The Hill do a fine job of explaining how this Administration plans to misuse this law and how ridiculous their premise is:

Trade surpluses in manufacturing are not proof of misconduct. They're the natural result of differences in savings, consumption and industrial specialization across economies. By treating trade surpluses themselves as suspicious, the administration risks turning Section 301 from a targeted enforcement tool into a weapon against basic laws of economics.

Section 301 was rolled out in the 1974 Trade Act to respond to specific foreign policies that burden U.S. commerce, like forced-technology transfer, discriminatory regulations or market-access barriers. It was never meant to police global trade balances.

...

In other words, the criteria are so broad that they would implicate virtually every manufacturing economy in the world. That's clearly not a bug, but a feature of an investigation that seeks to backfill the tariffs lost when the Supreme Court struck down the ones Trump invoked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. [bold added, links omitted]

It is interesting to note that, whatever the propriety of this law, this attempt to use it as an excuse for import taxes "blurs an important line between government policy and economic structure," in effect blaming capitalism by association for the consequences of the bad economic policies this law is supposed to address.

-- CAV

P.S.: In related good news, it looks like the Court of International Trade is doing a great job of holding Trump's feet to the fire in the matter of quickly refunding all the loot from the IEEPA import taxes.

Will Trump Finish the Job in Iran?

"The trickiest American manipulators are crude, naive and innocent compared to their European or Asian counterparts." -- Ayn Rand, "The Shanghai Gesture"

**

Writing in the New York Times, David French asks, [Can] American military excellence ... rescue [Trump] from his own impulsiveness and incompetence, when it comes to the war against Iran.

This column, which Yaron Brook mentioned in a recent podcast (0:02:00-0:50:10), discusses the problem, obvious before the first strikes to everyone except our Commander-in-Chief, of Iran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.

Or, in less harsh terms, although Trump was warned about this possibility, he dismissed its seriousness because he expected Iran to capitulate before doing so.

Obviously he was wrong, and his hopes -- based I surmise on his self-projection of all leaders as being mafiosi who all have their monetary prices -- that Iran will listen to his ultimatum are equally ridiculous. Trump may aspire to becoming a dictator and he may be successful as the leader of a shady enterprise, but he is too naive to appreciate what religious fanaticism is.

Aside from documenting Trump's refusal to prepare for this eventuality, French's piece is most valuable for laying out what a quick exit from this war -- which seems quite likely to me -- would mean in the future:

... Trump launched a major war on his own initiative while announcing competing and potentially contradictory war aims. Is the goal regime change? Unconditional surrender? Or is it much narrower -- the destruction of Iran's missile and drone forces, sinking its navy, stopping its nuclear program and destroying its ability to wage war through its proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the kaleidoscope of allied militias in Syria and Iraq.

The Iranian regime, by contrast, has a single, simple theory of victory: Survive. If the regime is still standing at the end of the conflict, then Iran lives to fight again. And if it survives at least in part through closing the Strait of Hormuz, then it knows exactly how to fight again.

Let that last bit sink in. Iran's regime has been tossed about like a rag doll, but can still, with minimal effort, cause the West a great deal of pain. If Trump allows that ability to remain, the best he would have accomplished is to buy us a few years' time before the mullahs can strike the West, as they demonstrated they could over the weekend.

Now we know Iran is already more than a regional threat, economically and militarily, that its leaders are willing to make good on that threat, and that they won't roll over and take a corrupt bargain like Trump wants them to.

I hope Trump ends up acting like he appreciates those facts, whether or not he really can.

-- CAV

Four Wins

A Friday Hodgepodge

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.

***

1. Next to making phone calls, setting up online accounts is probably the second most likely silly thing I am to procrastinate doing.

Yesterday evening, I finally got around to setting up a ChatGPT account and messing around with AI. I tried a couple of low-stakes questions: What is a creative way to use leftover pulled pork? was one of those. I didn't have ingredients on hand for its taco idea, but I'll use it some other time.

I also vibe-coded a simple bookmarklet idea I came up with some time ago, but couldn't pull off since I don't know javascript. It worked, and the AI even came up with some possible improvements. I'd thought of one of these, but thought it couldn't do that thing. Another is one I hadn't thought of at all, but will probably end up using. I'll have a nifty way to take notes on web pages on the fly after another iteration.

AI has its limitations, of course, but I am floored by its potential already, and am not too worried about making up for lost time.

Before choosing ChatGPT, I did some research and found this review of "The Best AI Chatbots of 2026" quite helpful.

2. Here's a short list of nagging minor problems I solved quickly one day when I realized I should default to check Amazon rather than look for it while I'm on errands:

• a decent drain stopper for the kitchen sink,
• an okay pair of casual shoes that aren't tennis shoes and won't show minor scuffs,
• serving-saver lids (!), and
• a new outside doormat for our front door.

Rabble-rouser populists constantly whine about how Amazon and the like are "killing off" brick-and-mortar retailers, but all of the above items are things that used to be pretty easy to find and now ... aren't.

I stopped several times over three or four months at the place I usually bought similar shoes without finding anything that would work. I won't be going back there for that again.

SHOES are one of those things that one would expect to be easier to shop for in person, given that trying them on is often a make-or-break proposition. But nowadays? I guess a few rounds of trying-on and mailing back would have been quicker, had what I bought not fit so well on the first attempt.

3. For ages and despite my occasionally asking him what he might like in his school lunch -- since he hates the whole cafeteria menu -- I have packed the same collection of things he might eat if he's hungry in my picky-eater son's lunch ahead of school.

Probably goaded by a growth spurt, he finally initiated working with me to come up with things he'd like.

It's actually easier to make his lunches now, and I usually am not throwing out food at the end of the day.

Good on him for taking an active role in solving a problem for both of us!

4. I'm enjoying the fact that we now have family card night many weekends. The kids like hearts, spades, and poker, and are pretty decent at the first two.

-- CAV

A Slick Writing Hack

Alison Green addresses an all-too common dilemma from a job hunter who has probably heard follow your passion a few times too many. Her reply not only pops that myth like a balloon, it is so efficient at course-correcting that it is worthwhile to take a moment to unpack it.

The question concerns how to write a cover letter for work one is not passionate about (Item 5). Green replies in part:

You don't need to write about your burning passion for dental offices! While a good cover letter might touch on a particular interest in the work, their bigger priority is to demonstrate why the candidate would excel at the job...

An exercise that can help: imagine you're writing an email to a friend about why you think you'd be really good at this job. Write that email...

Lots of writing fails because the author isn't clear on purpose or audience. On top of that, many struggle with achieving psychological distance, especially in this context.

Green's exercise attacks all three of these problems at once, and it is very easy to remember.

-- CAV

Fumento on Erlich

Michael Fumento considers some of the late Paul Erlich's ridiculous prognostications -- as well as one that was less "off" than popularly believed -- and declares him "wicked."

In addition to providing a quick primer of these predictions of doom, Fumento deserves credit for essentializing what is wrong with the thinking behind those predictions, and which remains so common today:

Ehrlich's pronunciations treated "resources" as static piles of stuff hidden in the ground. In reality, a resource is only a resource because of human knowledge. Oil was often considered that ruined farmland until Canadian scientist Abraham Gesner converted it to kerosene that proved great for oil lamps (ensuring that whales weren't hunted to extinction). Then came the internal combustion engine, and the rest as they say ... Sand was essentially dirt and a co-star in Frankie and Annette movies until we learned to turn it into silicon chips.

Yet as [economist Julian] Simon, a personal friend and lovely human being, argued in his book The Ultimate Resource (1981), the human imagination is the only limit to growth. When a resource becomes scarce, its price rises. That price spike acts as a signal for people to find more of it, use it more efficiently, or invent something better to replace it entirely. You don't restock the refrigerator if it's full. This is the feedback loop Ehrlich's biological models could never account for. [bold added]

Fumento memorably sums this up in his closing:

We are not fruit flies in a jar. We are the architects of the jar, and we've proven repeatedly that we can make the jar bigger, better, and more bountiful.

My main complaint is that Fumento comes so close to naming the fundamental error behind Erlich's arguments without doing so explicitly: Erlich was hoping we'd accept the deterministic premise he smuggled into his doomsday predictions despite the kind of evidence Simon marshaled for optimism. We have the faculties of reason -- which manifests as both imagination and awareness of limits other living things run up against all the time -- and free will -- which manifests as the choice to overcome those limits with our imaginations.

Erlich's conclusions were wrong, and so was his goal of causing us to forget how to command nature by creatively obeying her.

-- CAV

Would Trump's Poll Tax Backfire on Him?

A Yahoo! News report offers what are effectively two descriptions of Donald Trump's effort to rig the mid-term elections in the name of election "integrity."

Here's the second, which sounds a lot like something I could support, and that I'm sure lots of traditional Republicans and non-fanatical (but inattentive) Trump voters would, too:

If Republicans really just wanted voter ID, there is a simple way to get there. Have a bipartisan bill requiring a photo ID to vote -- while allowing the use of state-issued student IDs, and giving Americans who lack an ID a free passport card...

Indeed, I would bet money that lots of people think the above is a fair description of the SAVE Act.

The above follows what the SAVE Act actually is:

The core of the bill, requiring voters to prove their citizenship, is both a massive hurdle and a major poll tax. Under the bill, all registered voters would be required to go to a voting registrar in person to reregister, providing proof of citizenship. For those in 45 states, a Real ID will not suffice; voters would need a passport, passport card, or certified birth certificate (not a copy). For married women who have changed their names, there are many more hoops to jump through, including a marriage certificate and other proof of the legitimacy of their name.

...

[T]he current version of the bill ... requires all states to turn over all voter rolls, containing sensitive information, to the Department of Homeland Security -- something even deep-red Idaho, when asked to volunteer the data, refused. And states would be required to use a voter purge system created by DOGE, relying on Social Security system data that has been shown to be unreliable and biased. This is the same DOGE, by the way, that made off with the most sensitive Social Security information for hundreds of millions and tried to share it with a private company. With an error rate estimated at 14 percent or more, this program would require states to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters. [bold added]

The article notes that half of Americans don't have passports, and millions of those have no clue where their birth certificates (which are required to obtain a passport) are. Costs for obtaining a passport are $65-$165 and the time the process takes -- which was already high and will require much more time if millions apply so they can vote. And getting a birth certificate also wastes time and up to $100.00.

The story is right to liken this to a poll tax, and given the manner and application of "immigration enforcement," I strongly suspect that this is intended to serve the same purpose.

If this mess passes, I have a prediction: It will backfire. Donald Trump, as a populist, draws lots of support from the poorly-educated, which this measure will obviously affect disproportionately. It may come to MAGA's surprise, but this will stop lots of poor, uneducated, white people in their tracks. College graduates, who skew Democrat, will be better able to afford and navigate the process.

I thought of my late white trash uncle being disenfranchised. Yaron Brook thought of name-changing Republican wives. (Relevant section starts at 0:40:40.)

While a part of me would love the poetic justice of such an outcome, this bill is such a travesty that I still hope it doesn't pass.

-- CAV

Might Good Questions Drive Out Bad 'Questions'?

At John Kass News, physician-author Cory Franklin discusses "What the Media & Experts Aren't Asking About Measles."

Having not heard of Franklin until this morning and finding this story through a conservative news aggregator, I half-expected a bunch of folderol "defending" MAHA, and for a brief moment thought I'd found it in Franklin's first point:

Why are a majority of the patients with measles older than expected?

75% of patients are over 5 years old, and in 2025, more patients were over 20 than were under 5. The peak demographic age is between 5 and 19.

If vaccine skepticism was simply the result of RFK Jr.'s blather (and the COVID pandemic), why is the average age of cases around 9? RFK Jr.'s rhetoric and policies may be contributory but they were not causative for an older demographic that was not vaccinated years before RFK took office.

I was primed to expect silliness in part by the fact that some Trump person wrote in to me to the effect that it's wrong to blame Bobby Junior for the current outbreaks because he's been in office for only a year. (I have never said or implied such a thing.)

Kennedy just took office! is a classic half-truth, and, were it not for the terms blather and contributory in the above, it might be easy to spin it for the purpose of defending Trump's HHS head.

The problem with such a "defense" of the founder of Children's Health Defense (sic) is that Kennedy had been slandering vaccines for at least two decades before he took office. So while, yes, it would be ridiculous to blame current outbreaks on him or even mostly on him, the date of his appointment hardly exonerates him, either.

Due to his actions long before he took office, Trump's crony is partly responsible for the current outbreaks. (Just by looking at the above link, anyone under 21 who isn't vaccinated may well owe that state to Kennedy's "activism.") Furthermore, his words and deeds both fail to stem that tide and threaten to make future outbreaks more frequent and severe.

If those things don't make Kennedy a poor appointment, I don't know what to tell you.

That said, Franklin's next question suggests to me that journalists are missing an opportunity to bring up or discuss herd immunity, an important aspect of preventing diseases like measles, and perhaps why we're suddenly seeing outbreaks, despite large numbers of people being unvaccinated for so long. Absent that concept, it might be difficult to explain why people should be encouraged to vaccinate, despite their own indifference to catching measles themselves.

Franklin's questions are all thought-provoking, and answering them requires not just a command of "facts on the ground," but an integration of those facts into the kind of knowledge that one needs, at a non-expert level, to fight or avoid illness.

Such knowledge transforms I should get vaccinated from mere dogma to actual knowledge and, on top of motivating a healthy practice, would also cause more people to question the many baseless slanders (disguised as "questions" or not) against vaccination and find them wanting.

-- CAV

Gumbo My Wife Will Eat

Ages ago, I posted a gumbo recipe here, noting both that I'd gotten feedback from Louisianans over the course of creating it and that my wife, who is from New Orleans, does not like it.

Largely because of that last fact, I hadn't made it in at least a decade when my son asked me to come up with a gumbo recipe.

Before I go any further, let me thank my past guinea pigs for their diplomacy and apologize to them for making them guinea pigs in the first place: That might have been an okay soup, but the below is much closer to what one would find in a restaurant and, yes, my wife will eat it.

My thanks to Brandi Skibinski of The Country Cook for her recipe, which not only stands out for its superior flavor, but also for its explanations of some of the steps. I'm posting my slightly altered and stripped-down version below, but anyone making this should at least read through her recipe first, particularly regarding making roux and caramelizing the okra and andouille sausage.

The first time I made this, I made the roux, because I'd never done so. I am not ashamed to say I won't be doing that again, as the 45 minutes of constant whisking was for me more rite of passage as a chef than thing I want to spend my time doing -- on top of causing me to take three hours to make the recipe overall.

My son quipped that this is "good, but not 'three hours good'," after wolfing it down.

My main changes, aside from making the steps very easy to follow, are to substitute powdered roux, to add some chicken, and to provide for using less stock and fewer shrimp when one wants a smaller batch.

If you're not from Louisiana or thereabouts and your local grocer lacks such staples as powdered roux or andouille sausage, you can find them at Creole Foods of Lousiana.

***

Two Hour Gumbo

Preparation Time is 2 hours, using powdered roux.

Ingredients

butter, 1/2 stick
vegetable oil, 1/3 cup
powdered roux OR flour, 1/2 cup. (See Note 1.)
large onion, 1
green bell pepper, 1
celery, 2 stalks
minced garlic, 1 tbsp
fire roasted tomatoes, 14.5 oz can
seafood stock, 4 OR 6 cups
bay leaves, 2
black pepper, 1 tsp
salt, 1/2 tsp
Tony C's, 1 tbsp
okra, 8 pcs.
andouille or smoked sausage, 14 oz
crab boil, 1/2 tsp
shrimp, 1 OR 2 lbs (peeled, deveined and tails removed)
cooked chicken, 12 oz.
scallions, 2
rice, 1 cup

Directions

1. Mise en place: 2-cup measuring cup, pan for making roux (optional), pot and lid for rice, large pan for sausage and okra, large pot and lid for gumbo, the vegetables, the canned tomatoes and stock, the spices and crab boil, and the rice.

2. Dice vegetables except okra and scallions, and place in medium bowl.

3. Dice scallions and place in small bowl.

4. Place garlic in small bowl.

5. Place spices and salt in small bowl.

6. Chop sausage and place in large pan.

7. Chop okra and place in pan with sausage.

8. Add 2 tbsp oil to sausage pan.

9. Melt together butter and vegetable oil in a pan or gumbo pot over medium-low heat.

10. EITHER make roux per Note 1 and transfer to gumbo pot OR whisk powdered roux into butter-oil mixture in gumbo pot.

11. In parallel with the next 3 steps, turn sausage pan heat to medium and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Sausage and okra will partly caramelize.

12. Add chopped vegetables to roux in gumbo pot and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.

13. Add garlic to gumbo pot, mix and cook for 2 minutes.

14. Add fire-roasted tomatoes, spices, chicken, and 2 OR 3 cups seafood stock to gumbo pot, stir, and simmer, covered.

15. Add 2 OR 3 cups seafood stock to pan, scraping the bottom and stirring well.

16. Add contents of pan to gumbo pot and combine.

17. In parallel with the next 3 steps, bring gumbo pot to boil, then simmer, covered for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

18. Place shrimp and crab boil in sealable container, and shake to coat shrimp.

19. Place shrimp in refrigerator.

20. Prepare rice.

21. Add shrimp to gumbo, stir, and cook 10 minutes.

22. Add scallions and remove bay leaves.

23. Serve over rice.

Notes

1. To make roux: (1) Melt 1/2 stick of butter and 1/4 cup vegetable oil in pan. (2) Add 1/2 cup flour. (3) Whisk continuously over medium/low heat until the mixture turns a milk chocolate color. Note that this will take about 45 minutes.

2. If you like gumbo filé, it is always an option to add it to your own bowl, as Skibinski's recipe elaborates.

-- CAV

Updates

3-23-26: Added note about gumbo filé.

DST: Use the Disruption, but Also the Resentment

At Fox News, Bill Korman, who spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy, explains why "I'm the only man in America who wants to keep daylight saving time." (DST)

While his attempt to defend the twice-yearly government-mandated resetting of clocks is thought-provoking and makes some interesting points, his selective focus on the good Korman realizes from DST conceals its bad and its ugly aspects.

Korman is correct that what he calls "controlled adversity" presents an opportunity:

There are 168 hours in every week. The time shift is the one moment each year when the entire country is prompted to re-examine how those hours are spent. It is, quite literally, a blank slate. Audit your mornings. Kill a bad habit. Add a workout. Reclaim an hour from doom-scrolling. Growth rarely happens in comfort, and comfort is exactly what routine provides.

Yes. Disruptions can prompt self-improvement, although Korman undersells the advantages routines offer when he implies that comfort is some kind of enemy of self-growth.

I strongly disagree: "comfort," or at least a degree of predictability is a necessity. (Complaisance is the enemy here.) Man, as a rational animal, plans ahead best when there is some degree of comfort and predictability. Indeed, as a fellow former naval officer, I would like to indicate that affording these to a society is the whole purpose of government.

Have fun planting crops, building a business, or making the next great breakthrough when you can't enforce contracts, criminals act freely, or foreign powers show up to enslave you or steal what you own. The courts, the police, and the military -- when restricted to their proper scope -- are good and necessary things. Ordering us around, no matter how small the matter, is outside that scope.

Before I finish my critique of the above, let me note that it is Korman's strongest point. His other points are that the time change is a symbolic boundary, and that it is, as a shared ritual, a unifying "agreement" for our society. (What about the changes of the seasons? What about fireworks on Independence Day? What about the Declaration of Independence?) Korman's other points might also sound good to many people, but they are the key to understanding the ugly of DST.

But before we do that, let's briefly remember the bad of DST, which I summarized some years ago in a RealClear Markets column:

"But the science --" you might say, as did I. Here, the Senate is only half-right. Switching does cause heart attacks, workplace injuries, and traffic fatalities.

But, according to a peer-reviewed 2020 position paper by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, permanent Standard Time is where we should land, because it's closer to our biological clocks. Over time, a mismatch can contribute to problems like obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and depression. [bold added]

You say that's bad, but that sounds ugly to me, Gus! I can hear you saying.

What's ugly here is that these needless increases are caused by our government's immoral and impractical intrusion into our routines. Contra Korman, who asks us to regard DST as a "gift" and as "permission" to "step into a higher-output version of ourselves," let me counter that our government exists, not to shower us with "gifts," give us "permission" to do things, or regulate our "output," but to protect our freedom to to live our lives as we each, as individuals, judge best.

It is bad, but unavoidable that anyone has health issues or dies, but it is ugly for the government to not only fail to protect our freedom to do something about those things, but to abridge that freedom and cause more misfortune in the process.

That is a steep and unacceptable price to pay for the small advantages that this unnecessary intrusion presents even when viewed as an (easily-replaced) prompt, symbol, or ritual.

As an American, I find the notion of the government sculpting me to be patronizing and offensive on a personal level, and dangerous to the fabric of our country.

While I salute Korman's attempt to use this government-planned adversity as a cue to improve oneself, I say he doesn't go far enough on that score. The regular intrusion of clock-switching in our lives should, like the income tax, prompt us to work to reclaim our freedom from the nanny state, rather than meekly accept its Leviathan reach or, worse yet, perpetuate it.

-- CAV

Altruism vs. Serenity

At Ask a Manager, Alison Green fields the following question about some badly outdated advice: Why do people get so defensive over the concept of physically handing out resumes?

The person making the query witnessed a kid carrying around a stack of resumes and handing them out at a business plaza, likely at the urging of a clueless parent. Her ensuing conversation with a (younger!) coworker who saw the same spectacle went absolutely nowhere, and ended with a common type of complaint: [H]ow do I actually convince friends that this is a bad idea before they try it for themselves, if I even can?

As usual, Green gives a near-perfect reply:

As for how to convince friends it's a bad idea, you don't need to take it upon yourself to convince them! You can certainly share what you're learned and what your own experience has been -- and if the person seems skeptical or you're seeing them do things that are hurting their own chances you could send them a few links that might change their thinking -- but ultimately it's not really your job to change their thinking. Offer your perspective and talk about why you've come to it, but from there it's up to them. And really, life will set them straight eventually because if they try it, they're likely to see it doesn't work. I'm more concerned if it's someone giving that advice to impressionable others (like a career center telling students to do it), but that's a whole different issue. [bold added, links removed]

Although this post is about a mundane, fairly concrete issue, it contains a lesson applicable in spades to intellectual activism.

The desire to improve the culture by spreading better ideas makes sense, and not just to those of us who agree with Ayn Rand that history is ultimately driven by the kinds of ideas that dominate a culture -- or who simply want more rational people in our lives.

Likewise, the desire to simply help others do better in life isn't confined to having any sense of obligation to others. This person clearly wanted to help the kid out of good will, which is not, as many believe, the same thing as altruism.

It is easy to see the proper approach to trying to help others with Green's answer regarding this low-stakes issue: Do what you can, but know that past a certain point, it's up to them to understand, evaluate, and apply your advice, if they eventually accept it.

Past that point, one's efforts are a sacrifice of one's time, when it could be spent on better things. Interestingly, that is exactly what altruism demands of those who accept it. How many religious sects send people out to proselytize others? How many times have you met someone whose every conversation ends up being about some pet altruistic cause?

Even those of us who explicitly reject altruism will have to fight off its psychological remnants, which can manifest as an inability to let go of a lost cause like a person who thinks handing out paper resumes -- in the year 2026 -- is a great way to make a first impression.

I can't think of a better way to waste mental energy than by banging my head against such a wall, and that's because I did that a lot when I was younger. (Interestingly, discussions about evolution with a fundamentalist back when I was in college helped me understand this issue.)

Philosophy is, first and foremost, advice for how to live one's own life. And while, yes, it would be great if others in your life accepted a rational philosophy, you are missing the point if you spend too much time focused on making its case to their satisfaction. If people can be obtuse about small matters like this, they can and will be about bigger, more consequential things.

Don't be like them about them!

-- CAV