Freedom Four

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Iranian Protesters Deserve Our Moral Support," by Agustina Vergara Cid (The Orange County Register):

Supporting the Iranians is in our self-interest. A world without the Iranian theocracy will be better for everyone who cares about freedom and Western civilization. Recall that the regime defines itself in opposition to the United States (the "Great Satan") and Israel, and has vowed to end both. Since 1979, it has supported terrorism in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and various militias in Iraq and Syria. Its violence has shown up at our shores. (This is one of the reasons why military support, if carried out appropriately, shouldn't be discounted either.)

Column: 975 words/3 minutes

2. "Combating Vaccine Misinformation: Q&A With Amesh Adalja, MD," with Amesh Adalja (Patient Care Online):

Question: What communication strategies work best to address vaccine hesitancy without damaging the patient -- clinician relationship?

Dr Adalja: The approach depends on the setting. In media appearances, I'm more forceful to counter the anti-vaccine movement broadly. In the exam room, the goal is persuasion through trust. Ask patients what specifically concerns them, address that directly, and leverage the trust they have in you as their physician.

Studies show that a PCP's recommendation is one of the most effective tools for influencing health-promoting behaviors.

Interview: 725 words/2 minutes

3. "Three Low-Cost Methods To Improve Cognitive Function And Longevity," by Paul Hsieh (Forbes):

A recent study by Monash University student Emma Jaffa, Professor Joanne Ryan, and colleagues suggests that listening to music regularly was associated with a 39% decreased risk of dementia in people over age 70. Playing a musical instrument was associated with a 35% decreased risk of dementia. Doing both was associated with a 33% decreased risk of dementia. Their study included over 10,000 participants.

(I don't know why both listening to music and playing an instrument was not as effective as either alone.)

Column: 280 words/1 minute

4. "A Playbook for the Next Century of Progress," by Jason Crawford (Freethink):

The deepest roots of institutional change are cultural. Cultural change is thus the most important pillar of the progress agenda.

This begins with what our children are taught in school. Today, they are not taught the history or nature of progress. History classes focus on wars and empires; science classes teach concepts and frameworks; the story of technology and economic growth falls between the cracks. Steven Johnson, popular author of dozens of books on the history of technology, reports that in "an otherwise excellent American history textbook" covering the last 150 years, "labor" was mentioned 226 times, and "civil rights" 134 times, but "antibiotics" and "vaccines" were not mentioned once. "Something is fundamentally distorted in the emphasis here."

Book Chapter: 8550 words/30 minutes

-- CAV

Hot Take -- or Hot Mess?

At Improve Your HR, Suzanne Lucas notes the latest find in her "LinkedIn game" of spotting hot takes that obviously haven't been vetted by an expert:

A company where if you're 1 minute late to work, they make you stay an extra 2 hours!

She then proceeds to rip this to shreds over at Inc.

One thing that got my jaw to drop was the following:

20 minutes late, it's a PTO day

This reminds me of schools where the punishment for skipping school is suspension. Now, I presume Romero means employees would have to work and have it counted against their PTO bank, but I guarantee employees would just turn around and go home. Why go into the office if it will be counted as a PTO day?...

As soon as I saw that heading, I instantly imagined myself doing exactly what Lucas describes, and I'm not an HR professional.

This was the most obvious problem; many of the rest are not so obvious.

Lucas's demolition job is instructive in a time when contrarianism and questioning conventional wisdom are fashionable: There's some really stupid stuff out there that might sound good in the moment or get wide exposure for superficial reasons. (Here, I'd guess the severity of the punishments would appeal to a wide swath of people who aspire to be "no nonsense" or "hard-nosed" or "alpha male," from a place of wanting to be more assertive.)

There is no substitute for at least running such ideas through the thought experiment of imagining them being applied, and, especially if they're outside your expertise or experience, finding out what someone thinks who is an expert.

If something so obviously stupid is making the rounds, consider how many not-so-obviously stupid things also are.

-- CAV

Election Law Change May Help Cassidy

When Louisiana's Senator Bill Cassidy cast his decisive procedural vote to send Bobby Kennedy to the full Senate for confirmation as Trump's secretary for Health and Human Services, I took some solace in the knowledge that I could cast a meaningful vote against him in the next election.

Until very recently, Louisiana used a "jungle primary" system for its elections, meaning that all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, faced each other in an initial vote. Any candidate receiving a majority in this "jungle primary" won the election. Otherwise, the top two vote-getters would face off in a deciding election later.

Now, for certain elections, including for U.S. Senate, this system has been replaced by a confusing and expensive primary method designed to allow the two main parties to winnow their fields first, with independent voters having to pick a party for the duration of that election, if they want to participate in the primaries at all.

It is easy to see how the old system might have made it easy to defeat Cassidy, who violated his Hippocratic Oath when he rubber-stamped Trump's mindless decision to put an anti-vaccination lunatic in charge of the medical system and government-funded biotechnology research. Cassidy, who voted to impeach Trump back in 2016, was certain to face a MAGA challenger. With the vote split, a Democrat with decent independent support could more easily win Louisiana's Senate seat, sending a clear message to any Republican still capable of hearing one.

Now? Cassidy, who was already facing a MAGA challenger, is now also facing a second one endorsed by Trump himself, but this will no longer hurt the Republicans' chance of undeservedly holding this seat. Whoever wins that primary will be facing the Democrat alone in a state that Trump carried by 22 points, and in which anti-vaccine sentiment is higher than in many others.

That race was uphill for the Democrats to begin with, but it now looks impossible. I will cast a protest vote for the Democrat, anyway.

-- CAV

Journalists Cover (for) Iran Betrayal

A Vox piece carried by Yahoo! News promises speculation on "four possible reasons" for Trump's waffling on his threat to attack Iran if the Ayatollahs killed any protesters.

The Iranian regime has admitted murdering thousands since then, blaming the "deaths" on the United States and Israel.

Donald Trump's response?

So far, I hear crickets, and the barbaric clerics remain in power.

As I imagine many would do upon seeing such a headline, and hoping there could be legitimate reasons for a delay, I read the piece. Its four reasons are weak sauce, and sound like the usual left-wing excuses to tolerate hostile regimes.

Worse, the results of decades of bad American foreign policy will make these excuses sound more credible than they should, even to people who realize that American foreign policy should be one of self-interest.

The "reasons," as summarized by section headings are below, followed by my brief comments:

• Will the US lose credibility? -- Our leaders have a long history of laying out "red lines" and then either still doing nothing, or not doing enough. Trump doing nothing will certainly damage what little credibility we have left. This regime is so evil that its downfall alone would be an enormous net benefit. It's hard to imagine how Trump doing enough to make this happen could hurt American self-interest, especially if he also unleashes Israel, which he should have done after we hit Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities.
• Will it create new problems? -- This drops the entire context of the decades of worldwide problems the current regime has already caused and will definitely try to cause in the future, if it is left in place.
• Would it accomplish anything? -- As opposed to not acting? Given America's decades of appeasement and half-measures, it's an understandable question, but it's not the right one.
• Will it create false hope? -- If the last question was wrong, this one is obscene. Trump promising aid, and then reneging is what would have created false hope, and led to thousands of people -- who might have waited for more promising circumstances before acting -- to put their lives on the line prematurely. I am dubious about how well-thought-out an Iranian rebellion has been or could be, but it should say something that the people are out there facing bullets.

The piece ends as follows:

This story is still far from over, and intervention is still very much on the table, but the people of Iran would hardly be the first to rise up against an autocratic government with America’s encouragement, only to find that there are limits to how far the US was actually willing to go to support them.

I doubt that anyone expects the United States to do everything for them, and this is true, as far as it goes, but it would be fair to condemn our previous administrations for paying lip service to freedom, without backing those words up meaningfully.

This regime is weak, and it would be short work for us to destroy enough of its military and state police capacity to topple it. That would be in our interest, and it would have been fine for Trump to have communicated such an offer with limits, rather than grandstanding, as I am afraid he has done.

-- CAV

Rand's Essay on Racism Stands Test of Time

To start the holiday, I re-read Ayn Rand's classic 1963 essay, "Racism." It is the most thorough diagnosis of why some individuals become racists -- and the best prescription for what to do about racism -- that I have ever read.

There is no substitute for reading the whole thing, but the following passage struck me as quite prophetic, given today's political climate:

The "civil rights" bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights. It is proper to forbid all discrimination in government-owned facilities and establishments: the government has no right to discriminate against any citizens. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to discriminate for some citizens at the expense of others. It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine -- but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist's freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist's right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue -- and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

Needless to say, if that "civil rights" bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.*

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently -- the Negroes -- are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

A word of warning: do not become victims of the same racists by succumbing to racism; do not hold against all Negroes the disgraceful irrationality of some of their leaders. No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

I'll confine myself to a local phenomenon I was recently disturbed to learn about: Mississippi, where I was born and raised, doesn't just commemorate Robert E. Lee's birthday. It does so on the same day as the federal Martin Lurther King holiday.

In 2026.

It strikes me as possible that this may well be the case in part from the kind of reaction Rand describes above in the last paragraph -- and which journalists might sloppily call a "backlash." The pervasiveness of the neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myth in the culture is at least equally responsible. Both threaten the high degree of progress towards King's dream that has occurred there, largely during in my lifetime.

The fight for individual freedom never ends, and fortunately, we have a powerful ally in that fight.

-- CAV

Blog Roundup

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Give Me Your Tired ... Never Mind," by Brian Phillips (The Texas Institute for Property Rights):

[Kristi] Noem's announcement came shortly after an Afghan immigrant was arrested for allegedly shooting two members of the National Guard. Because of the actions of one Afghan, all Afghans are to be treated as criminals. Imagine the outrage if Noem announced that, since some white men born in Ohio have engaged in criminal activities, all white male Ohioans will be treated like criminals.

390 words/1 minute

2. "Trump's Gestapo Is Now Murdering Protestors," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):

ICE men are not police officers. Disobeying them is not anarchistic because their function and raison d'etre are to grab people and deport them.

Yes, given the laws against immigration, their actions could be called "law enforcement" in the abstract, but as we have seen, ICE acts arbitrarily, violently, thuggishly. They do not restrict their actions to criminalized immigrants. Or, more precisely, they, not the law, decide what the scope of their actions are.

The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts. The nature of ICE as an entity is: arbitrary force. They are thugs. I would never refer to them as "law enforcement."

(My use of "Gestapo" is figurative. Literally, ICE is the transition to that kind of evil agency.)

1150 words/4 minutes

3. "Let's Repeal 'State Capitalism'," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):

[R]epealing statism doesn't have to start with a wholesale revolution. We can often have more influence than we think, by opposing freedom-curtailing government policies as they are being proposed and demanding better protection of individual rights, particularly property rights. This can be done by reaching out to our political representatives and using social media to raise awareness of the mixed economy's propensity toward statism -- and its negative impact on our freedom and flourishing.

615 words/2 minutes

4. "Value Jars, an Emotional Resilience Tool," by Jean Moroney (Thinking Directions):

The practical effect of this process is that "deep rational values" will occur to you spontaneously when they are relevant. That happens because you have programmed your memory banks so that these values are more easily triggered.

...

The work involved is not memorizing a list of words. It is integrating them with your knowledge and values. That -- the conceptual connections with your existing values -- is what makes introspecting your emotions and re-orienting to values faster and easier. And doing that quickly is having emotional resilience.

1,375 words/5 minutes

-- CAV

'Less Idiotic' Guidelines? That's Debatable

Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian recently took a look at the latest federal diet guidelines and concluded that they are "somewhat less idiotic" than the ones that had been on the books before.

While I think Menton shares my contempt for federal dietary guidelines, I don't share all his convictions about nutrition, and I want to state up front that, in my opinion, the only reason to consider anything Bobby Kennedy says is for the purpose of arming oneself against the latest round of dishonest pronouncements from this man, whom Donald Trump and his cowardly lackeys in the Republican Party have granted an undeserved bully pulpit.

When Bobby Kennedy isn't lying, he's making things up -- to the extent that I'd look up for myself if he told me the sky is blue.

That out of the way, whatever motivated Menton to look through the guidance, my summary would be that (1) some of it might resemble an improvement in dietary advice in the same way a clock stuck at 12:00 will appear to be right twice a day; (2) lots of it (e.g., "Eat real food.") is meaningless, but will sound good to people with poor intellectual hygiene; and (3) lots of it is exactly the kind of nonsense that, until five minutes ago, conservatives appeared to know was exactly the kind of stupidity one might expect from an anti-vaxxer hippie.

Regarding the first, Menton notes that even the apparent improvements might not really be:

[I]t is not clear at all that the war on saturated fats has actually been ended. On the first page of the new Guidelines, we find straightforward recommendations to "consume meat" and to "consume dairy." That's a pretty good start. But then on page 3, we come to this:

In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories.

And as for the second and third:

[T]hey just can't stop themselves from going off into pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. Start at the top of the introductory message from the Secretaries:

The message is simple: eat real food.

What does that even mean? Elsewhere in the document they bounce from "real food" over to "whole food," another meaningless term as far as I can tell. Yet another term that appears a few times is "nutrient dense." What does that one mean? Sounds like pure mumbo jumbo to me.

As you would expect from Kennedy, there is much criticism of "highly processed" foods (e.g., "Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet.") Well, the term "highly processed" sure sounds bad. But does "processed" include, for example, cooking? Why isn't that OK? Where is the line drawn? There's also a recommendation to avoid "chemicals." OK, how about vitamins? Aren't vitamins chemicals? Is it OK to add them? If vitamins are OK, how about preservatives?

The more of this you read, the more you realize that they don't know what they are talking about...

Thank you, Mr. Menton, for helping me know that I'm not the only person on earth who knows that cooking is a form of processing, that not all processing is bad, and that food is made of chemicals -- including water.

Menton's closing take is far more charitable than mine, which is that Kennedy should never have been nominated or confirmed, and that he should be impeached and removed from office. (See South Carolina or the recent changes to child vaccination schedules for starters.)

The government has no business being in charge of science or medicine, but so long as it is, it should take pains to seek out and follow the best scientific advice out there. And no, that does not mean "gold standard science" as defined by a dishonest attorney who wants to sue vaccine makers.

-- CAV