Gus Van Horn

The American Spectator: High on Its Own Supply?

2026-09-15T07:10:24.736-06:00

One of the most eye-opening and disappointing aspects of the rise of Donald Trump has been the apparent decline of conservative journalism.

I say apparent because I have to allow for the possibility that, until that john came along, I just wasn't good at recognizing prostitutes when I saw them. That could, in a way, speak well of me, but all blindness has a price.

Case in point: A recent puff piece in The American Spectator, a publication that a quick search of my archives shows I have referenced at least 16 times over the years.

Its title? "RFK Jr. Wows the GOP Like Jeane Kirkpatrick Did in 1984" (The equally embarrassing subtitle doubles down: "In Dallas, Kennedy reprises a 1984 convention theme: a lifelong Democrat explaining why he crossed the aisle.")

I understand that the founder of this conservative organ is Catholic, and that, accordingly, it espouses social conservative positions I don't agree with, such as opposition to abortion.

I can respect such a stand in the sense that, if an unborn fetus really is human, then abortion should be outlawed as murder.

This post isn't about abortion, but the fact that they hold such a position is important.

Back to the piece...

I was young, and not that engaged in politics during the Reagan Administration. Beyond anti-communist, I don't have a solid grasp of Jeane Kirkpatrick's foreign policy positions, but I suspect they were at least okay for the time, and that her heart was in the right place.

I estimate that she left her party for basically the right reason and did what the Overton Window at the time -- nudged by Reagan -- allowed her to do to stand up to the Soviet Union.

However fair my estimate, she was no turncoat, and her adopted party didn't whitewash anything from her past.

How times have changed!

Get a load of this opening:

Thursday evening at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly brought the GOP midterm convention audience to their feet with a speech reminiscent of Jeane Kirkpatrick's speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Like Kirkpatrick, RFK Jr. noted his Democratic Party roots. Like Kirkpatrick, RFK Jr. emphasized the differences between the modern Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of a bygone era. RFK Jr. was a Democrat chosen by Republican President Donald Trump to "make America healthy again," while in 1981, Kirkpatrick was a Democrat chosen by Republican President Ronald Reagan to help him win the Cold War.

RFK Jr. stated that neither his father (Robert F. Kennedy) nor his uncle (John F. Kennedy) would recognize today's Democrats. Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1984 noted that neither Harry Truman, JFK, nor Lyndon Johnson would recognize the Democrats who gathered that year in San Francisco, whom she labeled the "blame America first crowd." [bold added]

I'll skip the gooey, pus-like filler of this disgusting piece of sycophancy, but go for it if you're into spiritual masochism...

The conclusion is rich:

Just as Ronald Reagan was in 1984, according to Kirkpatrick, making America safer and more secure, so Donald Trump today is, according to RFK Jr., making America healthy again and needs a Republican-controlled Congress to complete this important work. [bold added]

This is all being said about a person well-known as an anti-vaccine crank, among a group of people who -- until five minutes ago -- saw vaccination as common sense, and regarded anti-vaxxers as dumb hippies who belonged in California.

Kennedy must have enjoyed speaking of people not recognizing their own parties, because I am sure Reagan wouldn't have recognized the one he was speaking to.

Bobby Kennedy is an anti-vaccine crank who deserves to be known as a baby killer, especially after his 2019 exploits in Samoa, which led to a measles outbreak that killed 85, most of whom were children under five.

This piece of refuse is whom Republicans and The Spectator lionize? That rag has an entire section of supposedly "pro-life" writing. Have they changed their minds about the value of human life, however they define it? Or is that profession of concern about human life as hollow a show of "virtue-signalling" as Kennedy's professed concern for our health?

-- CAV

The Cost of Turning Away Talent

2026-09-14T07:13:57.731-06:00

Back in July, Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute considered the costs of Trump's anti-immigration agenda, and finds them exorbitant.

The gist of this well-argued and alarming piece:

...STEM students who stay in the U.S. after graduation "patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States. They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates."

That means we can dispense with the idea that if a foreign engineer gets a job, an American engineer must have lost one. Protectionism applied to human capital relies on the same economic fallacy that underlies other forms of protectionism: the belief that the economy is like one pie, and hence, allowing foreign interests to take a seat hurts those already at the table.

Economies don't work that way. Talented people don't merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting companies, conducting research, and making the people around them more productive. In the process, they create opportunities for other people that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Giving a cold shoulder to foreign students is particularly absurd when you consider Washington's obsession with competing against China. Politicians insist that America is engaged in an existential technological race. They spend billions of dollars subsidizing semiconductors and other favored industries. They develop elaborate industrial policies intended to make America dominant in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.

Then, when a potentially brilliant young scientist from India, China, or anywhere else earns an advanced degree at an American university and wants to stay and contribute to the American economy, our government says perhaps they should leave.

You can throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a semiconductor factory in Arizona. You cannot manufacture genius through an appropriations bill. [bold added]

Economists have managed to put the cost in dollar terms:

[D]iscouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7 percent to 1.3 percent smaller, or roughly $200 billion to $400 billion in GDP over a decade -- equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina.

This is bad enough, but de Rugy correctly warns of higher, intangible costs that American patriots should appreciate.

I think the piece does a good job of both demolishing the ludicrous "fixed pie" view of the economy protectionism is based on and offering positive arguments in favor of making immigration safer, legal, and more common.

I would recommend it to anyone genuinely curious about whether immigration is a good thing -- a question many people can be forgiven for asking these days, thanks to the full-court press of nativists of late.

-- CAV

Blog Roundup

2026-09-11T06:32:21.666-06:00

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "9/11 -- 25 Years Later: Objectivism, Islamic Totalitarianism, and America's Crisis of Ideas," by Elan Journo, Onkar Ghate, and Yaron Brook (New Ideal):

September 11, 2001 -- and America's response to it -- shaped the 21st century. Confidence in America's ability to win wars cracked, trust in leadership and experts went down, and, in response, populism, nihilism, and conspiracism raised their ugly heads. From day one, the Ayn Rand Institute's experts grasped the meaning of the attacks and the significance of a proper response. They called for war with Iran and opposed Bush's altruistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their advice was not followed, but their predictions held.

In this special livestream marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, and Onkar Ghate -- the Institute's three leading experts on the attacks -- trace what went wrong in its lead-up and aftermath, and how Ayn Rand's philosophy let them foresee what most people still struggle to understand.

2.25 hour podcast

2. "After 9/11, What Went Wrong? ," by Elan Journo (New Ideal):

Since September 11, 2001, the Ayn Rand Institute has commented extensively (via articles, books, interviews, lectures, and podcasts) on why the 9/11 attacks happened, how America should have responded, and why -- 25 years and three wars later -- the United States still fails to confront Islamic totalitarianism.

ARI's analysis of 9/11 and its aftermath has proven tragically accurate. To mark 25 years since the attacks, we are pleased to announce the publication of the third, expanded edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, which includes short essays on October 7 and the war in Iran, and we invite you to join us for two special events.

1820 words/6 minutes

3. "Election Fraud: Information vs. Propaganda," by Peter Schwartz (Peter Schwartz):

If someone says to you "7 times 3 equals 21," you can judge that statement as true. Which means that it is a successful effort at cognition, a successful attempt to grasp reality. But if you hear those same words being uttered by a parrot, you cannot judge them as either true or false. The squawking of a parrot is outside the realm of cognition. The parrot is not trying to name a truth. It is just emitting sounds.

The same applies to Trump's statements about election fraud. He does not care whether his assertions are actually true. So one's initial response should not be to grant his arbitrary claims a cognitive status, any more than one would to the parrot's squawkings. Rather, one should ask: What is Trump's purpose?

600 words/2 minutes

4. "Died Of, Died With, Died in a Vacuum," by Amesh Adalja (Tracking Zebra):

If I were teaching public health communication, I would use this week as the case study in how not to do it. It is an unforced error, and it is much better to be transparent than to spend the week trying to score points against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

My stake in this is not abstract. I am an infectious disease, emergency medicine, and critical care physician who takes care of patients in Pittsburgh and Butler County hospitals, and I spend a large part of every week explaining this virus -- to reporters, to audiences, and to people who are not ideologues but are genuinely unsure what to believe. This week made every part of that job harder. The anti-vaccine movement is emboldened, and it did not have to earn it. Pennsylvania's health officials now look to a substantial portion of the public like people who were being either dishonest or manipulative, which is corrosive in a way that outlasts this outbreak by years. And the person who was merely hesitant last month has now watched a governor, a coroner, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services contradict each other about whether two people died, which is precisely the kind of spectacle that converts hesitancy into conviction. That conviction does not stay in the exam room. It becomes unvaccinated kindergarteners, and unvaccinated kindergarteners become measles cases, and measles cases eventually become the thing everyone this week has been arguing about whether we actually had.

1950 words/6 minutes

-- CAV

'Asses in (Car) Seats' vs. Management

2026-09-10T07:18:11.724-06:00

Consultant Gleb Tsipursky recently examined the latest iteration of what I like to call the "Asses in Seats" method of management: Using the commutes of the people one should be managing as proof-of-work.

Tipursky's analysis is quite thoughtful. For example, he considers gains in productivity seen with working from home during the pandemic and the more recent use of artificial intelligence, and offers, for example, that good use of AI requires focus -- which is often superior at home and away from the distractions of an office.

At the same time, Tipursky recommends judicious use of in-office "anchor days" for those things, like mentoring or collaboration, that work better in person.

Overall, he makes a good case for a more active evaluation of output and how different environments affect different kinds of work.

As if the positive motivation of having a choice of work environments at one's disposal weren't enough, Tipursky cautions against the movement towards full-time office work because subordiantes are hardly powerless:

[Fully onsite] policies may fit some cultures and business constraints. But executives should admit they are making a bet, not simply following settled science.

The labor-market effects make the bet riskier. Employees often value flexible work because it returns time, reduces commute friction, and lets people handle life logistics with less daily stress. In Bloom's Trip.com trial, the reduction in quits was especially visible among women, non-managers and long commuters. That should get the attention of every leader facing skill shortages, retention problems or rising compensation demands. A hard office mandate can quietly convert a productivity question into a talent leakage problem. [bold added]

I found his arguments compelling and hope the "hybrid model built around results instead of rituals" he advocates catches on.

-- CAV

A Rogues' Gallery of 'Net Zero' Apostates

2026-09-09T06:18:03.860-06:00

"This is just the pure religious nature of the climate catastrophist movement. It has one commandment: 'thou shalt not impact nature.' They just think that everything good is a happy climate god and everything bad is a vengeful climate god." -- Alex Epstein

***

According to John Stossel, world leaders and corporations who once backed Net Zero are "ditching" that foolhardy and dangerous policy, some more quietly than others:

Now, countries like Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom are walking back their net-zero push.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now says rules must "better align climate targets, market realities, companies and jobs."

He also said, "It was quite simply a strategic mistake to phase out nuclear energy."

No kidding.

And here in America, I hear less climate fearmongering.

The Washington Post reports, "analysis of lawmakers' appearances and posts on social media show they are going quiet on climate."

"It's very surprising to many people," says [author Alex] Epstein, "how unserious the climate catastrophists were about net zero, and the way you can see this is what's happened with the rise of AI."

Tech companies now report increases in emissions, even though "five years ago, they were all telling us: 'climate change, existential crisis, got to go net zero!'" Epstein laughs. [bold added]

I was glad Stossel interviewed Alex Epstein for this piece, since the good news he delivers deserves good analysis. Epstein holds that we're in a better intellectual environment, but is quick to point out the fact that so many people who once pushed Net Zero seem to have memory-holed their past actions.

I wouldn't say climate catastrophism is dead, but it is in a real retreat worldwide, rather than just superficially looking that way in the United States because the current President has slightly hindered it, and tends to suck all of the oxygen away from other news.

-- CAV

Midterms: Peril for Trump, Senate in Play

2026-09-08T07:26:16.221-06:00

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic predicts a "tidal wave" against Trump in this fall's midterms.

I am skeptical of a tidal wave: Gerrymandering will mute the bloodbath Trump deserves, and might save his party in one or both chambers of Congress, but Tomasky has successfully defied the conventional wisdom in the past:

... I've also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody -- I mean everybody -- was saying that Bill Clinton's Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year's midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police -- Gingrich's mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican -- than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely. [bold added]

Tomasky is, of course, a leftist, so you'll get the obligatory psychological projection and condescension towards voters to the right of Stalin as part of "MAGA-land" -- and you will get to mark your bingo card slot for data centers bad.

That said, I think Tomasky's got a point about each of the three groups he sees in the polls, even if his grasp of their motivations is a little suspect.

Were I to recast what he came up with:

Anyone who never liked Trump will feel particularly motivated to show up and vote.
Swing voters who believed that Trump could be good for the economy will vote heavily against his party.
Racists and other MAGA-adjacent voters will be disenchanted, and so much less likely to turn out than they were for the presidential election.

I think Tomasky is right about (1) and mostly so about (2). He may underestimate Trump's ability to get a tune out of the groups in (3), though.

(The alarming prominence of democratic socialists in the Democratic Party will play right into Trump's hands. That said, I'd be a fan of Trump if I were a "progressive:" Trump is doing some of their dirty work and setting them up to win in 2028.)

The rest of Tomasky's piece consists of (1) his explanation for why he doubts Trump can reframe things in time to save his party, and (2) comments about a few races that wouldn't be as interesting as they are if only a normal person went to the White House back in '24.

Oh, and Tomasky isn't the only one talking about unexpectedly tight races in red states.

-- CAV

Vote Early and in Person

2026-09-07T06:53:03.193-06:00

Donald Trump's looniness about elections is both red meat for his base and a pretext for doing whatever he thinks he can get away with to "find the votes" he wants in the next election. Accordingly, his legislative efforts at "reform" should serve as a shot across the bow.

It does not nelp at all to hear that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is now offering the kind of "reassurance" that sounds like a threat. Namely, he says that ICE agents might show up at polling places on Election Day -- but just to address "threats" to said polling places, or to serve warrants.

Knowing Trump's hostility to voting by people who look like they might be foreign, and to voting by mail, it might be worth considering how to hedge one's bets this November.

Fortunately, Washington Monthly has put out some guidance. Here are its main points, which the article elaborates upon:

Vote early in person.
Encourage your friends and neighbors to vote. Help people get to the polls.
Record and report.

The advice concerning recording voter intimidation is particularly valuable, as it includes how to spot intimidation, how to comport oneself, and what to do with any evidence. The piece also wisely cautions against "do[ing] the administration's work" by panicking or overhyping the risk.

-- CAV

Blog Roundup

2026-09-04T07:19:10.971-06:00

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "One Contradiction in the Fear of Laissez-Faire," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):

The operative image of economic regulation is that of a huge truck without steering or brakes. "We have to have those instruments of control, or the truck will go careening off the side of a cliff."

The truth is that government regulation is precisely the cutting of the brake lines and the seizing up of the steering column.

790 words/3 minutes

2. "Is Capitalism Scary?," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):

Productive work also yields savings that can be invested to provide extra cushioning against life's vicissitudes. Taking private insurance against accidents, illness and disability adds extra protection. (Those who are truly unable to support themselves, save, and afford insurance, must rely on private charity -- that historical evidence has shown to flourish in the conditions of freedom and the absence of government welfare programs).

850 words/3 minutes

3. "Trump, Iran and Moral Discriminations," by Peter Schwartz (Peter Schwartz):

An effective foreign policy must make moral discriminations. It must identify the nature of a country that is an enemy, and the nature of a country that is a friend. Merely looking at a country's weaponry cannot guide us. Nuclear bombs in the hands of Iran or North Korea are very different from nuclear bombs in the hands of England or France. Just as the guns possessed by criminals call for a very different evaluation than do guns possessed by the police.

440 words/1 minute

4. "The Thinker Identity (Part 1)," by Jean Moroney (Thinking Directions):

The Thinker is the person who makes full use of the power of his mind. He takes theory and applies it in practice. He observes practice and conceptualizes his observations into new theory. He has an active mind in that he is always observing the world around him, always integrating new knowledge with the old, always looking for the root causes that explain the results he sees. He does this in every area of his life, managing his mind by exploiting his volition, his values, and his knowledge.

This identity does not require a particular degree of intelligence or level of education. Rather, it ensures that you will continually increase your functional intelligence and become self-educated in every area that matters to you.

1130 words/4 minutes

-- CAV

RE: 'Where are all the dead bodies?'

2026-09-03T07:12:05.333-06:00

The saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence can be a guardian against being mislead, but only when one recognizes a claim as being extraordinary.

That can be harder than it seems, as a recent Dr. Nerdlove reply to a young man (who has let the "manosphere" convince him he has no romantic prospects) indicates:

The reason why it hurts and upsets you is because you hear it over and over, and that has a way of settling in as being "true". So the first step is to see if it's even true in the first place, but the second step is to stop giving them any oxygen at all. Once you start cutting those voices out of your daily life and start going out and actually interacting with people in person, you'll be amazed at how much better you feel and how much the real world doesn't resemble the nightmare hellscape that the manosphere and incels want you to think it is. [bold added]

The good "doctor" notes elsewhere that many of the people peddling such nonsense want to push something sketchy, and that encouraging fear and insecurity is a big part of how they do that.

The debunking of "the science" here is worth noting, as it reminds me of something I am fond of saying when anti-vaccine nonsense rears its ugly, brainless head.

Said debunking begins thus:

All of it, like the whole 80/20 or 10/58 (where the f--k did THAT come from?) thing, or the 6-6-6 "rule", these all fall apart if you actually look at the numbers, because none of them actually line up with reality. If any of these were actually true, we'd be seeing it everywhere -- hordes of single men watching helplessly as the towering Vikings of the top 10-20% were walking around with their harems. Except they aren't, and we actually do have the numbers.

This reminds me of two things: (1) I like to say Where are all the dead bodies? when I hear nonsense to the effect that the covid vaccines are deadly, and (2) I can remember a time when I was young that such drivel about dating sure seemed like it could be true.

There are a couple of lessons here off the top of my head. First, don't take "scientific" claims of doom at face value. At least try checking them, guided by taking their implications seriously. (2) Consider the idea that, in our awful culture, many people are inundated by seriously wrong BS, to the point that they are likely to give some of it credence, and should be treated with empathy. Otherwise, "Where are all the dead bodies?" or "Where are the Vikings and their harems?" might simply make you sound like a jerk and cost you a chance to help someone else out, and thereby incrementally improve your own world.

I like to think I'm good at the first, but I'll admit I could stand some work on the second.

-- CAV

Trump Socialism in the Defense Bill

2026-09-02T06:27:54.781-06:00

At Reason, Veronique de Rugy rightly takes Republicans to task for sneakily doing what the Democratic Socialists of America at least have the decency to be open about, reagrding government stakes in private companies:

As Cato's Tad DeHaven notes, "The seven nonbinding letters of intent would provide up to $874 million in CHIPS and Science Act research and development incentives." Remember when most Republicans were against the CHIPS Act passed under former President Joe Biden? I do. And remember when they claimed to care about fiscal responsibility?

How about opposing ownership stakes simply because the right may not always be in charge? An executive branch that can hand out ownership at its discretion has acquired a permanent power, and such powers outlive the people who establish them. Picture a future Democratic president inheriting 30 companies' worth of shareholder rights and the leverage that comes with these: board seats, emissions mandates, conditions bolted onto the next round of funding.

This is no paranoid fantasy. The Senate's defense bill would give the Pentagon its own equity portfolio, which means Congress may write the administration's practice into statute rather than kill it. The right is loading a gun and trusting that only its friends will hold it. LOL, as the young people say. [bold added]

Yes. Today's Republicans evidently don't appreciate points that one would have once thought obvious to them.

The rest is worth reading and includes a succinct reminder of why government ownership of companies is such a terrible idea.

The steep decline of the Republicans on economic issues is so startling that I'll spare de Rugy criticism for failing to ask By what right does the government own anything?

These people can't get even the easy stuff right, anymore.

-- CAV

Florida Violates More Than Religious Freedom

2026-09-01T07:04:27.233-06:00

Ron DeSantis, whose Covid-era anti-lockdown policies have morphed into an anti-vaccination agenda, has received pushback from an unexpected source and for an unexpected reason: Catholic schools oppose being forced to grant religious exemptions for their vaccination requirements.

Beth Mole of Ars Technica does a good job of covering the back-and forth, and notes the irony that this measure is infringing on religious freedom in this case:

The bishops' letter highlights a fallacy often used by anti-vaccine advocates: that undermining vaccines and dismantling vaccination requirements upholds religious freedom, when in fact it can be an attack on that freedom. Just on Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed weakening the wording of federal vaccine recommendations "in favor of individual autonomy and religious freedom." Yet, no major religion in the world forbids vaccinations, and most encourage and embrace them as a common good, like the Catholic bishops. [bold added]

This is true, but it the religious focus is dangerous because religious freedom is a subset of intellectual freedom, and is limited in the same way: One can profess whatever one wants, but one is not free to violate the rights of others. For example, if your religion calls on you to execute heretics, you do not have the right to do so.

The real problem with the religious exemption is as I have stated before (regarding DeSantis's mandate that cruise ships accept passengers without proof of vaccination during a pandemic): It violates one's property rights and one's right to contract to force someone to do business with someone one does not want to do buisness with.

A Catholic school -- or any private school (and all schools should be private) -- is a business. The owner (here, the Catholic Church) has the right to determine how to use the premises -- including keeping unvaccinated people out -- and the right to determine whom it will do business with -- including refusing to accept customers (students) for any reason whatsoever (such as the reasonable belief that their unvaccinated status could turn their business into a pesthouse).

-- CAV

Explaining the Current Anti-Vaccine Hysteria

2026-08-31T07:23:30.985-06:00

In an X article titled "The Two Rituals: What Leviticus Knows About COVID, Fauci, and Measles in Lancaster County," physician Amesh Adalja considers events from the Covid pandemic to the current return of measles outbreaks to a nation that had once eliminated the disease. In doing so, he relates them to the current rise of anti-vaccine (and even anti-medicine) hysteria on the right.

His ancient starting point is startlingly apropos:

These are, on their face, two different problems. Leviticus 13 concerns an affliction of the body. Leviticus 16 concerns transgression against a deity. But both are impurity, both threaten the population, and both are the same leader's responsibility. What Leviticus offers is not a theory of disease but a system for handling contamination -- and that system has exactly two operations. Examine the afflicted, at length, and reach a determination about what they actually have. Or gather the pollution onto a designated carrier -- a scapegoat -- and drive it out. The second method is fast and requires no real objectivity. [bold added]

While one might regard bringing up scapegoating as the prelude to a defense of Anthony Fauci, such a conclusion would be only partly correct, for Fauci is just one of the scapegoats in the analysis, which goes on to explain how vaccination and even the entire field of medicine ended up also being scapegoated.

Along the way, Adalja also looks at what each of our nation's political tribes got wrong in their responses by choosing the second, easier ritual and the unanimity/illusion of certainty it provides:

The refusal [by lockdown proponents] to consider risk stratification, risk calculation, and harm reduction was a failure. The honest answer to COVID-19 would produce different guidance for different people -- and different guidance is unusable to anyone who needs a universal rule. The immunocompromised patient deserved a real conversation about their specific residual risk and the additional tools available to them. What they got instead was conscription into an argument about everyone else's behavior.

The mirror image runs the other way. The disease is no worse than the flu. The vaccine does not work, or works so briefly it doesn't count. The vaccine's harms are catastrophic and concealed. And doing nothing costs nothing at all.

This is not inquiry, which would be welcome. What happened instead was that every one of the four questions above was answered in advance by a conclusion already held, and the answers moved as needed to protect it.

The four unasked questions?

How dangerous is the disease (does it cause death, hospitalization, healthcare utilization?) and to whom?
How well do the medical countermeasures (treatments, vaccines, post-exposure prophylaxis) work, if any are available? And for whom?
What does the medical countermeasure strategy cost?
What is the cost of inaction?

But Trump started the lockdowns! you might correctly remember. Adalja addresses that and explains why the right has memory-holed that fact and why vaccination was ripe for scapegoat status:

I have written elsewhere about where the anti-vaccine movement's epistemology came from -- the postmodern critique of scientific authority, the flattening of expertise, the treatment of consensus as a species of power. That genealogy explains how people acquired the confidence to disbelieve expert claims. It does not explain why vaccines became the object. Nobody organizes against statins. Nobody holds rallies about dialysis.

The answer, I think, is that vaccination is the one medical intervention routinely justified to the patient as an obligation to other people. Get it to protect the immunocompromised. Get it for your grandmother. Get it for herd immunity. Every other intervention in medicine is offered on the grounds that it will help you. This one, uniquely, is pitched as something you owe.

That framing is well-intentioned and largely true. It is also precisely what made vaccination available to a critique about bodies being conscripted for collective ends. When a field argues its case in the language of what you owe the collective, it should not be surprised when someone predisposed to see medicine as social control finds the evidence in its own words. And there is a second cost: by making the case in terms of what you owe others, public health left the benefit to you underemphasized for decades. [bold added]

In addition to noting how this messaging made vaccines ripe for goat status, Adalja explains why this eventually happened -- in short, because scapegoating doesn't really work.

I am not sure I have done the piece justice here, but I hope I will have motivated someone to see how Adalja ties this all together, and manages to explain how so many people who seemed to understand the value of vaccination five minutes ago are now its hysterical opponents.

There is lots to unpack here, but this is the kind of knowledge it will take to fight for the selfish value of vaccination and medicine.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

2026-08-28T07:15:39.815-06:00

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Fans of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile will be delighted to know that they can track the current and future whereabouts of the fleet via WhereMyDogs@.

2. Alison Green has begun posting lists of past Ask a Manager posts on Fridays. Recently, the title, "Toll Collectors, Fear of Being Set on Fire, and Other Things We Believed About Work When We Were Kids" caught my eye. My favorite from the post was the first, on what someone thought firing was as a toddler:

When I was 4 or 5, I tended to take most things literally. So I thought getting fired meant that if you were bad at your job, you were taken out of the building and set on fire as a punishment.

This one is good from top to bottom, and the stories are short and sweet.

3. If you like the tech news aggregator site, Hacker News, you might also like the Bubbles site, which does a similar ranking of personal blogs.

A couple of short posts I bumped into recently illustrate that there's no telling what you'll find there on a given day: "Gulf of America. Lake America" and "This Guy Made an ASCII Cyberpunk City Using HTML and JavaScript."

I was tempted to embed the video of the city, but I'll recommend you stop by Kai Gulliksen's blog, instead.

4. If you've ever wondered What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?, someone who "attract[s] these people into my life" has a somewhat lengthy, but very interesting answer.

The answer considers four levels of personal wealth and looks at each, with one example of a thing billionaires buy (in an indirect sense) being access:

You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer...

The end of the answer was sad, but very good in the sense of providing a reminder, much needed in today's culture of envy, that billonaires are human beings, and face adversity just like the rest of us.

-- CAV

A Better Way to Talk About ...

2026-08-27T08:01:01.062-06:00

... Etiquette, Vaccination, and More

Twice yesterday, I encountered two of my favorite commentators urging a more self-interested discussion of two things America would do much better with more of: etiquette and vaccination.

Both were a breath of fresh air, but I'll start with the one that mildly surprised me, although it really shouldn't have.

Miss Manners takes a question from someone who by chance observed an acquaintance being extremely rude in a store.

The questioner looked away, but may not have escaped detection, and so wondered if a greeting was in order.

Unlike so many who would have probably said something about sparing the acquaintance embarrassment, Miss Manners advises sparing oneself:

As you were not the one who misbehaved, there is no etiquette rule preventing you from greeting your friend with a cheerful smile. But Miss Manners does feel that your solution is both more tactful and less exhausting, as you were then spared the explanation that would no doubt have followed about why she thought her rude behavior was justified by the part you did not see.

Yes!

That would be tiresome, on top of being awkward and unpleasant. While it does comport with my typical inclinations, it's nice to have that underscored with an explicit connection to the real value of etiquette: That it helps us lead our own lives more smoothly.

Less surprising, but wonderful to see coming from a highly visible and respected national figure is a recent comment by epidemiologist Amesh Adalja about how people discuss the subject of vaccination.

Around the 16:30 mark of his podcast,in Adalja starts by criticizing a pro-vaccination op-ed that relied on the idea that we are all our brothers' keepers, backing himself with research concerning what motivates people to get vaccinated. Older adults found arguments based on preserving their own independence more persuasive, for example. Adalja's own framing is in part:

"Vaccines are a technology that lets an individual live in a world full of infectious disease threats. They free you from worry... [T]hey make that risk much more manageable. ... They're increasing your freedom of action...

I completely agree with him that the brother's keeper argument is missing a highly persuasive reason to get jabbed.

Sane people -- who are the only ones worth reaching out to, anyway -- want to improve their own lives. That sounds like a much brighter and less frustrating starting point for any discussion than anything else to me.

-- CAV

Dolly Parton, RIP

2026-08-26T06:53:18.126-06:00

I am not a country music fan, and I was not that familiar with Dolly Parton's work. But even I had heard enough about her intelligence and self-reliance to respect her.

In that vein, I highly recommend George Will's column about Parton's passing. It captures both her strong character and the once-healthier (albeit far from perfect) culture of America around the time she was born.

I especially enjoyed learning about her lone professional encounter with Elvis Presley (of whom I not a fan):

She was a savvy businesswoman even when getting started in Nashville's music industry, which was not a lagoon of advanced thinking about the emancipation of women. In 1974, she was 28 and starstruck when Elvis Presley expressed interest in meeting her and recording "I Will Always Love You," which she had written. But when Presley's management insisted on at least half the rights to the song, she refused, the meeting was off, and she never met -- never again wanted to meet -- Elvis. But Ackmann reports that Parton said keeping the copyright to that one song made her enough money -- perhaps $10 million -- she could have bought Graceland, Elvis's Memphis home.

Will also captures the good and the bad of Parton's cultural background in a couple of places, although I am not sure he'd agree with my evaluation of the latter.

Just ahead of the above excerpt, Will notes the commonality of self-reliance in America at the time of Parton's birth:

Her family knew the old story of a cheerful preacher saying to a hardscrabble farmer, "This is a right nice place you and [the] Lord have here," and the farmer replying, "You should have seen the som'bitch when the Lord had it hisself."

Good! Some prosperity gospel types should hear that one, but I digress.

As a fellow Southerner of Parton's, I see what Will means about allocation of status and respect and would add that it isn't just a sensitive topic for the uneducated. But as I see it, this concern often borders on defensiveness:

[Biographer Martha] Ackmann says that, as a child, Parton heard, early and often, this phrase: "Don't get above your raisin'." Meaning, don't get too big for your britches. Most of all, don't forget where you came from. [bold added]

That kind of advice is a two-edged sword at best, and reminds me things I got growing up.

Sure. See the good in your background and don't let the stereotypes of others cause you to forget your own worth or the good you saw around you when you were young. But don't just take that culture uncritically, like too many of the people who give such advice seem to want.

Based on her self-emancipation as a woman, while boldly putting herself out there, I would say Dolly Parton got that largely right.

-- CAV

J.D. Vance is a Huey P. Long Fanboi

2026-08-25T05:48:25.424-06:00

The Republican Party of the future is not going to be the party of Milton Friedman. We're going to enjoy spitting on his grave, metaphorically speaking. -- J.D. Vance

***

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity -- which is what we need for every man a king -- to come true has done the dirty work for anyone who might be wondering who this Huey Long dude -- who's suddenly all over the place -- is.

After all, J.D. Vance, Trump's de facto successor in the Republican Party, just publicly held him to higher esteem (to put it mildly) than Milton Friedman as indicated by the quote above.

The Committee includes a photo linking to video and transcript of Louisiana's autocratic former governor and senator laying out his socialistic Share Our Wealth plan, with an excerpt beneath.

Here's a sample:

I propose a limitation on how big a fortune can get and a limitation on how little a fortune can get ...

A capital levy tax to be levied -- the first one million not to be taxed except as it is now taxed; and the second million to be taxed 1%; the third million 2%; the fourth million 4%; the fifth million 8%; the sixth million 16%; the 7th million 32%; the eighth million 64%; the ninth million 100%. That means that no man with that tax levied against him every year can possess a fortune of more than from 3 to 4 to 5 million dollars to any one man ...

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with ...

I agree that this sounds like Bernie Sanders, but it's worse. The delivery is slick -- skillfully focusing on envy to help his audience forget that the wealthy earned their money by trade that also improved their customers' fortunes; and imagine that stealing is okay, so long as the victim has more than the thief.

He makes his theft sound noble, and redistribution generous.

This is who Vance admires, and fortunately doesn't have the charisma to match.

I have asked this before and will ask it again of anyone holding out the Republicans as an alternative (let alone a superior one) to the Democrats: What would it take for you to concede that there is no longer a difference?

Vance is as bad on the merits as any Democrat, and worse by virtue of the common, increasingly wrong belief that the Republicans are "better for the economy" than the Democrats -- who are also much worse than they used to be.

-- CAV

Drones: Grounded Harder Than You Think

2026-08-24T06:22:38.043-06:00

John Stossel's latest column -- and video, which I'm embedding below -- are worth your time and are both incredible for two very different reasons.

Let's start with the positive side of the ledger. Stossel's six minute video will be an eye-opening demonstration (or reminder) of the potential for this new and rapidly evolving technology to improve our lives.

"Companies like Wing and Zipline bring people hot meals in under 10 minutes. I had to watch it to believe it." -- John Stossel

Even though the technology is relatively new, and many people remain unfamiliar with it, enough people are that market feedback has led to impressive improvements. People who grouse about propeller noise, for example, may be surprised at how quiet some of the newer models are, if they notice them at all.

On to the negative side of the ledger: As amazing as this technology is, the sheer obduracy of the regulatory state is giving it a run for the money. Stossel touches on this a couple of times:

Drone delivery was supposed to be common years ago. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes he expected Amazon to be sending out drone deliveries by 2017.

But most of us still don't have it. Why?

And later:

President Donald Trump hopes to speed that process. He signed an executive order telling the FAA to fast-track drone deliveries by allowing drones to fly beyond line of sight.

But he did that more than a year ago. Government is, as usual, so slow! The FAA didn't even respond to Trump's order for months.

If you think that's bad, this is on top of something I commented on nearly eight years ago:

The President who wanted to remove two old regulations for every new one recently signed into law the FAA Reauthorization Act, which repeals an old statutory exemption from FAA rules for model aircraft, such as drones. The new law will take some time to take effect...

What happened to that? is just about all I can say. Unlike today, that was one of the few times the President bothered to involve the legislature in an attempt to affect a policy. It would seem to have had absolutely no effect.

Considering this in very general terms, I'd say this may be a case of things being earlier than you think on a front for the battle for freedom. This President has no principles and never bothers to articulate why he wants to achieve anything. As a result, he has blown two opportunities to build momentum for a much-needed revision of a policy that is crippling a new sector of the economy. And that sector, as we are seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East -- and can thus easily imagine -- has national security implications.

And yes, China is already way out in front of us.

-- CAV

Four Nifty Things

2026-08-14T05:46:32.553-06:00

A Friday Hodgepodge

Editor's Note: I will be recovering from a minor medical procedure next week and will not be blogging, although I will probably post on X/Twitter most days. I plan to be back here on August 24.

***

1. Some time ago, I encountered a kitchen gadget site called the Blind Kitchen, which I used to give my wife gift ideas for Christmas that year.

One such gift was this wide-mouthed funnel, which is excellent for transferring hot food and liquids into thermoses. It's faster, eliminates messes, and prevents scalded fingers.

2. When using thermoses for lunches, I like to add hot water to them for a few minutes before the food, so as to conserve the heat in the food.

One day, I remembered a small appliance a grad school friend used for keeping hot water handy for tea, and realized that would save time in the morning and make it easier to enjoy tea later in the day. Based on excellent reviews, I purchased a three liter Zojirushi water boiler/warmer.

I just fill it first thing in the morning, plug it in, and set the desired temperature. In less than half an hour, I have all the near-boiling water I need available when I want it for the rest of the day.

3. Another item I learned about from the Blind Kitchen, but couldn't find there later was a meat chopper similar to this one.

I'd never seen or heard of these before, but I bought one.

It's low-level amazing how much faster, easier, and more effective this is than the end of a spatula on the way to producing a uniform texture when cooking ground meat.

4. Stymied by an impenetrable wall of AI agents which kept telling me to do the same (ineffective) thing when I needed to gain access to one of my online accounts, I recalled a site I can't believe I've never mentioned here before: GetHuman.

This site tells you how to reach an actual human at a business of your choice.

I was on hold for about fifteen minutes, but we were able to fix the very odd and rare problem with my particular account.

-- CAV

Not Everything Is Either-Or...

2026-08-13T07:39:20.000-06:00

... or at least the choice or the alternatives aren't always obvious.

Three very different situations I read about in my weekly look at advice columns surfaced the same common thinking error. I've heard this called "binary thinking," but I'm not wild about the term. False dichotomy is another one that doesn't quite sit right with me here, although I like it better.

I'll roll with the above title and state that not every situation has a clean-cut, either-or set of correct alternatives, or at least if there is a clear-cut solution, its application requires enough thought that applying the solution will require significant effort.

Indeed, just after writing the above, I'm inclined to see discovering the issue or application of a clear choice as issue(s) that can muddy any problem.

Two of the three letters I considered are similar in many ways, and pertain to family dynamics being strained by strong differences in ethics or political opinion.

In one of these, Carolyn Hax tackles the question of a woman who, although very different from her in-laws, is looking for a way to continue seeing them, rather than not visiting them at all, as her husband suggested. To that idea, Hax correctly argues that the choice isn't keep seeing them as usual OR not at all:

[D]on't underestimate avoidance as a permanent solution. Boycotting is extreme, sure, but... You can make the visits a wee bit shorter, a tad less frequent, a smidge more structured (a movie, a play, another venue where conversation is similarly discouraged). After a day or two, you can spin off on your own to visit a friend who lives somewhere (remotely) nearby. You can become Super DIL and go grocery shopping (alone), weed the flower beds (alone), do the dishes (alone) ... especially when politics erupt.

In other words, you can control the dosage more, and more good-naturedly, than you think. A fresher you can then focus on where your interests do overlap.

The similarity to the adage, The dose makes the poison, resolves the apparent contradiction of the woman being driven crazy by her in-laws, but still wanting them in her life. The rest of Hax's excellent answer concerns determining what, exactly, bothers the woman and helping her become able to make peace with not resolving that, at least any time soon.

An Ask a Therapist letter concerns a more serious problem that does merit leaving a relative out of certain family gatherings, but not cutting off all contact. Again, for good reasons, the writer wants to maintain contact with a wayward son and the sister he has alienated, but does not want to condone what her son has done:

Granted, this might feel like a hard limit for you to set, especially because your son might never repair the damage, but doing so accomplishes two things. First, it takes a clear protective stand: Those harmed shouldn't miss out on the joy of family gatherings; those who harm shouldn't be present in these settings. Second, it leaves room for you to continue to see your son separately -- though not neutrally.

Here, the time to cut all ties has plainly not come for the mother, who has some hope that it never will come.

The third letter, regarding the difficulties a couple face when one partner has determined a need to become sober, presents a very clear choice that someone is having trouble applying in the context of his marriage and wider social life.

That difficulty disappears when Dr. Nerdlove reminds the writer that, while his spouse can certainly support his efforts, she doesn't have to go sober herself, and that they needn't get rid of everything that came with drinking socially:

[T]hat doesn't mean that your relationship is doomed. It just means that you're going to have to figure out ways to accommodate what can feel like conflicting, even mutually exclusive desires. They don't have to be conflicting, mind you; it will just require some creativity and mutual accommodation to make it all work without threatening your sobriety.

One thing that can help is if you can figure out what, precisely, you miss about drinking, besides the literal alcohol. Many times, part of what people miss when giving up any vice is the routine -- lighting up a cigarette at certain times of the day, mixing drinks for yourself and your wife before settling in to watch a movie, going out to dinner and drinks on a Saturday night. It can be helpful to find ways to keep the ritual in your life, but without the booze component.

Other times, it could be the tangible aspects that you miss, such as how people who give up soda often miss the sensation of carbonation and the mouth feel of the bubbles or the tang of the caffeine on the tongue. Having something that can replace those sensations or those tactile aspects can make it easier to resist when you're flooded with urges to relapse.

There're a few options, if you're of a mind...

The full answer is ingenious in that it doesn't just address the very real relationship concern, but also the difficulties of making a major life change generally. Here, the choice was clear, but hard to apply, and hindered by the incorrect idea that many of the things that went with the vice would be lost forever when getting rid of that vice.

So after all of that, were there clear choices? Yes: (1) She wants to know her in-laws while keeping her sanity; (2) She wants to protect her daughter and possibly help her son; and (3) He wants to save not just his life, but his marriage, from his problem drinking.

-- CAV

Pillow Guy Holds Out for Padding

2026-08-12T07:16:48.325-06:00

Depending on which conservative you read, either disaster was averted or an an election was stolen in Minnesota's Republican gubernatorial primary yesterday.

Credit John Hinderaker of PowerLine with enough sense to see that pillow magnate and Trump stooge Mike Lindell was a poor choice for governor:

Lisa Demuth, the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, has been called as the winner of the Republican primary for governor. Results here. This is notable because Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was also in the race, and he was endorsed by Donald Trump. Trump's endorsement was, frankly, idiotic. Lindell hadn't the faintest qualifications to be governor, and if he had gotten the nomination, he would have been crushed by Amy Klobuchar, something like 80% to 20%. Lindell led in some polls, but I never believed that he had a serious chance, in part because I know hundreds of people who voted in the Republican primary, and I don't know anyone who voted for Lindell. [link omitted, bold added]

Qualifications? He's loyal to Trump, just like Bobby Kennedy. Any American racing to the bathroom after a salad will tell you that's good enough.

Sarcasm aside, the polls, as of this morning, show the same 10% drubbing as there was when Lindell -- somewhat predictably -- refused to concede, only with 99% of precincts reporting:

"I'm down by 20,000 votes with 277,00 [sic] votes left to count," Lindell said as votes were being counted on Tuesday night. "Now, would you give up if you got 277,000 left to count? And these are the day-of votes, which haven't been counted yet. These were all mail-in and early votes for Lisa Demuth. So, I mean, why would I say here and go, 'Ok, I can't make up 20,000 [with] 277,000 left to count?' So, that's where we're at."

Moreover, Lindell suggested something nefarious was afoot. [bold added]

Of course it was rigged. He'll keep going when all the votes have been counted, unless he wins.

For those of us on Planet Earth, there is good news and bad news, depending on whether one sees continued ~~Republican~~ Trump Party control of the Senate as a good thing. (I don't.)

As Hinderaker notes, Lisa Demuth won't "drag down the ticket" against her loony left Democrat opponent, which will benefit Michele Tafoya, who won the GOP Senate primary and faces a charisma-challenged far-left opponent in Peggy Flanagan.

This makes the GOP more likely to flip a Senate seat in Minnesota, which would make the unlikely prospect of the Trump Party losing both houses remote, as the Senate was never going to be easy.

The Trump Party, long overdue for a repudiation, thus seems less likely to get one, and so, less likely to move away from Trump and towards being the real alternative to the left that Americans are desperate for.

-- CAV

Trial by Ordeal Makes a Comeback

2026-08-11T05:55:51.088-06:00

I hear from the Guardian that Anthony Fauci pled the Fifth 100 times in Senate hearings about his actions during the pandemic. To a certain knee-jerk portion of the body politic, I hear this means that Trump's former advisor is guilty as sin and should be locked up. [Insert whistle here.]

Amesh Adalja: "Blaming Fauci Won't Prepare Us for the Next Pandemic"

Unfortunately for MAGA, that same trial-by-ordeal-like "standard" would have have their hero, Donald Trump, behind bars long ago: He did the same thing over 400 times during a 2022 deposition in New York about his namesake organization's business practices.

But that was a witch hunt! will be their version of But this is different!

Trump is openly, obviously corrupt -- and Fauci plainly isn't omniscient and made mistakes. Two things about each can be true at once: Authorities can (1) have valid reasons for wanting to understand their past actions better, and (2) choose to perform a witch-hunt instead.

In 2022, the Democrats were incompetently trying to bring Trump down before the election for legally weak reasons -- after inadequately pursuing several serious legal matters they should have already had well underway by then.

Now, the Republicans, who -- as Amesh Adalja argues in the embedded video above -- should be interested in looking back at their handling of the Covid pandemic are instead trying to simply scapegoat Fauci.

Regarding Fauci, I once said:

As much as I am personally inclined to dislike Fauci, he is a human being who had a very difficult job to to. He should state his side of the story clearly, and we should hear it before passing judgement on him.

That isn't what happened in the hearings.

Regarding actual post-mortems, the Guardian piece mentions the commentary of Zeynep Tufekci, which I found thoughtful.

I concluded that post as follows:

It is interesting, and not in a happy way, to consider what this pandemic has revealed to us about the state of our culture (as manifest in its intellectual and governing classes), both in terms of what passes for knowledge and in terms of how society should be organized.

That observation applies particularly well today. The Guardian notes:

No surprise, really, that Fauci, now retired from his public post, invoked the fifth amendment more than 100 times during last week's Senate committee hearing.

That's the action that -- though reasonable enough given all the circumstances -- is the supposed impetus for holding him in contempt. Now the committee has referred the matter to the justice department for possible criminal prosecution.

Fauci could see the writing on the wall as this trumped-up hearing began. In his opening statement, he singled out the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, the Republican committee chairperson.

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars'," Fauci said. "Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."

I agree with the Guardian that Fauci does not deserve this, and I agree further with epidemiologist Amesh Adalja (whose podcast is embedded above) that "Blaming Fauci won't prepare us for the next pandemic."

-- CAV

Pay for Overhead?!?! Yes, Please!

2026-08-10T05:56:35.861-06:00

An Australian budget airline is coming under fire after offering its customers a new way to make flying less stressful.

That new way?

Paying for overhead storage:

Jetstar says the decision followed feedback from both passengers and airline staff, who identified "having bags weighed at the gate and struggling to find room in overhead lockers as the more stressful parts of the airport experience," according to a statement released by the carrier on Wednesday. [bold added]

I don't fly that much, but for a time I did. Trying to use overhead storage was so annoying for precisely these reasons that I tried to confine myself to a computer bag I could fit under the seat in front of me.

Whenever I did have a second carry-on, I usually had to hunt for somewhere to put it (and then remember to take it with me on deboarding) -- thanks probably to the people who went wild with carry-ons and are now getting the most bent out of shape over the announcement:

The move immediately triggered backlash on X, where flyers accused the airline of dressing up an unpopular fee as a customer-friendly option. "Jetstar rebranding a blatant cash grab as "Priority Carry-on Choice" is a masterclass in gaslighting. Hope it backfires," wrote one user.

Others questioned whether the airline should even be allowed to do it. "Seriously? How is this legal?" wrote another. A third vowed to take their business elsewhere: "Well I know who I won't be flying with," a third said.

A masterclass in gaslighting?

Choice is exactly what "free" overhead storage denied me most of the time. I, for one, would have loved knowing I could put any carry-on close to my seat, where I could remember it and get it quickly at the end of my flight. On top of that, on those flights when one might need access to the bag -- e.g., parents traveling with infants -- access would be quicker and there would be no need to plan for the contingency of juggling things at the last second because some clown wants to avoid checking bags.

I'm rooting for Jetstar, and hope its idea catches on.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

2026-08-07T06:52:54.323-06:00

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. From a news story about the "alien chemistry" found within a meteorite, here's what to do if a meteor strikes your home and you want to help scientific progress:

He then immediately preserved and documented the entire scene using disposable gloves and aluminum foil to place the meteorite fragments in glass jars.

The surviving rock weighed two pounds and was a rare, and especially interesting type.

Well done!

2. At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe notes that researchers looking to use filtration instead of distillation in parts of the oil refining process were able to make use of a problem inherent in choosing a pore size to filter a substance containing molecules with a wide range of sizes:

... [O]ne thing that was noticed quickly was the the initial liquid coming through was still quite dark, but then lightened considerably for the rest of the run.

It turns out that a thin layer of higher-boiling material coats the insides of the pores of the PAN membranes as the first material is sent through, and analysis of the conditioned membranes suggests that this is made of up high-boiling long-chain alkanes, rather than polyaromatic material. The authors could actually wash this off with straight toluene, giving a PAN membrane with the original behavior that was apparently no worse for the treatment. It appears that the original PAN pores of around 15nm are narrowed to 2nm or below by this adsorption layer, and both the size and the chemical characteristics of the "new" pores are responsible for the separations.

So you just need to clog things up a bit, the right way, and you're in good shape. Who knew? ... [bold added]

As one commenter quips, "[G]ood as new is worse."

3. Continuing our theme of improvisation for a moment, I learned recently of a company claiming to make the world's largest zip tie:

To be clear, we're not just talking about length, although at 47 inches long it's certainly substantial. But extremely long zip ties already exist for things like wrapping large bundles of cable. This one is also cartoonishly thick, and features a similarly upscaled locking mechanism that allows it to hold up to 2,000 pounds, according to the company.

The monster ties can be had for $75 apiece, 12 for $800, or 15 for $1,700.

4. Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine isn't just approved, it soon may be available at pharmacy near you:

Major insurers have previously indicated they will continue to cover vaccines. However, sign-off from a federal vaccine advisory panel can influence coverage in certain states, though some are moving away from requiring the panel's recommendation...

It's difficult to predict how broadly pharmacies would stock the newly approved mRNA flu vaccine in the absence of recommendations from ACIP and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Brigid Groves, a vice president at the American Pharmacists Association. However, pharmacists' authority to order and administer vaccines in many states is no longer directly tied to ACIP recommendations, meaning "authority may be less of a barrier than it would have been in the past," she said.

It's good to know that there is resistance to the hostile takeover of the FDA by the anti-vaxx movement.

One advantage of the new vaccine, mentioned in the story, is that it will be easier and quicker to change it to match the prevalent flu strains in circulation than vaccines using older technology. This is because the latter take six months to manufacture.

Based on a quick, cursory search, I think the new vaccine matches the same strains as the old. Whether this is because the group in charge of selecting the target strain chose well, or there is some other reason, I have no idea.

-- CAV

Conspiracism vs. Creativity

2026-08-06T06:52:41.577-06:00

Although Alison Green wasn't writing about conspiracism, a recent post of hers at Ask a Manager indirectly reminded me of that phenomenon, and the seemingly creative ways that conspiracists purport to explain what's "really going on."

Green takes a question about what might motivate instances of apparently mixed messages from management in a couple of instances the writer is aware of, and the immediate short answer is what caused me to think of conspiracism:

You're imagining this as all more cohesive than it is -- that there's a grand plan unifying all their actions, but very often there isn't.

Green tackles each of the scenarios in turn, and culminates in a list of typical reasons situations like the ones she was asked about occur:

Plans changed, and the earlier conversations planning the change took place above their heads and they weren't even aware it was under discussion.
Plans changed, and they were in those earlier conversations but didn't think it would go the way it went, or were simply juggling too many other things to game out exactly what it could end up meaning for everyone under them until it actually happened.
Someone above them mentioned something that put pressure on them (and therefore their team) in a way they weren't anticipating earlier.
Something happened that you don't know about that is changing how they're approaching something / how much they care about it (for example, they told you last month you didn't need to stress about expense report deadlines and they then discovered your coworker hadn't turned any in for a year and so now they're less laissez-faire about it).
They're being pulled in multiple directions and so haven't sat down and thought things through as deliberately as you're imagining; they are managing through chaos.
They messed up. Sometimes this may simply be because they're human, and other times they might not be a great (organized/thoughtful/attentive) manager.

Hanlon's Razor states that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Not everything on the above list qualifies as stupidity, but many can look a lot like stupidity. All are things known to occur frequently enough that it makes sense to consider them as possible explanations before jumping to the conclusion that a puzzling event is motivated by some kind of plan.

Needless to say, similar kinds of things to the above non-exhaustive list can occur in other situations involving any kind of organization.

In light of the above, conspiracist "explanations" look far less creative than a truly deliberate consideration of the possible causes of a puzzling event.

-- CAV

Trump to Bring Back the Gas Line?

2026-08-05T07:10:28.418-06:00

At RealClear Markets, Peter Grossman of the National Center for Energy Analytics considers President Trump's recent tirades against "unrealistic" gasoline prices and what an authoritarian ignoramus like him might do about them.

Along the way, a name increasingly familiar lately for other bad reasons comes up: Richard Nixon, whose brilliant solution to inflation, price controls, sounds like it would be right up Trump's alley.

I am old enough to remember gas lines and rationing fuel by allowing sales on certain days to even or odd tag numbers, but I didn't get the full picture of the carnage that wreaked: I was, after all, not even 10 back then.

Grossman fills us all in on what we can expect if Trump pulls such a stunt:

Refiners and retailers had to petition for price increases, and couldn't automatically pass on rising costs. Decisions were handed down at the start of the following month. As a result, many gas stations simply closed during the final week of each month while waiting for approval to raise prices. Allotments were also made monthly, and some stations had to close toward the end of the month having run through their supplies before they could replenish their stock. This only lengthened gas lines.

Because stations could not just pass along costs, government controls squeezed station profit margins. Consequently, hundreds of stations closed for good in 1973-4. [bold added]

Any economist who knows what he is talking about in the least will warn against price controls, but in the Trump era, will they be heard at all?

They're not part of Trump's inner circle, and he made it clear long ago that they aren't wanted in his party.

In a time when the brain-dead and those who pander to them mock "experts" and "elites" -- while praising blind faith in a single, not-too-bright individual -- it will be the voices who could easily spare us a lot of pain who are least likely to be heard.

Trump supporters would do well to consider how similar the idea that Trump will do it right sounds to the socialists who are even now saying This time, it will work!

And vice versa.

I won't be holding my breath.

-- CAV