I Like It When They Don't Even Pretend.

The Huffington Post on CEO Bob Mackey: prepare to experience journalistic integrity:

As the NY Times write-up of "the most unexpected" sideshow to the 2009 Health Care Debate put it: "Reaction from pro-reform Whole Foods shoppers was swift and vociferous."

Mackey is pro-reform, which is clear when one reads his WSJ Op-Ed. If his plan (which is similar to that prescribed by Milton Friedman) were enacted, the changes would be monumental. But for some liberals (such as Brian Beutler from the NYT article) if it's not in the direction of a single-payer system, it's not "reform." HuffPost should be able to field authors who can differentiate between different kinds of "reform." (Since 46% of healthcare in the US is paid for with tax dollars, it's not as if there's no room to increase the scope of the non-coerced market for health care.)

Now the Change To Win Investment Group and United Food And Commercial Workers Union -- both a part of the Change To Win federation of unions representing six million workers -- have put out statements criticizing Mackey and encouraging a boycott of the store.

This is about as likely to work as Bill O'Reilly's boycott of France over their aversion to the Iraq war. It's enlightening to see unions acting like BO'R, though.

CtW called for Mackey's removal as chairman of the board and CEO. "Mr. Mackey attempted to capitalize on the brand reputation of Whole Foods to champion his personal political views, but has instead deeply offended a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base," the group's executive director Bill Patterson said in a statement. UFCW has begun handing out pamphlets to Whole Food shoppers. The group said Mackey's op-ed was an "attempt to undermine Obama's health-care reform." (Whole Foods is not unionized.)

If liberals won't give the CEO of even a beloved chain a chance to describe non-Obamacare solutions, then they are as blinkered and reactionary as conservatives who still adore George Bush. Most liberals don't even know that wage fixing during WWII lead to our current health care system or how huge government interference already is. And if they shut up people like Mackey (as CtW and the UFCW want to) they never will.

Not everyone is so taken aback by Mackey's suggestions.

Why the italics? Every single libertarian and most conservatives would prefer Mackey's solutions to Obama's. To paraphrase: not everyone thinks that Obamacare will destroy America.

In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker declared, "Now is the time for all good capitalists to shop at Whole Foods." Parker's sentiments are echoed by several conservative bloggers and journalists. Doug Bandow wrote in the American Conservative that "it is good to see at least one company stand on principle." Blogger Radley Balko of The Agitator blog strongly concurred: "I plan to do a lot more shopping at Whole Foods in the coming weeks."

The author can't make a simple differentiation between libertarian and conservative. Radley Balko used to work at Cato and now works at Reason, both famously libertarian organizations. For somone like the author, the distinction may not matter, or she can't figure out how to research his history.

Organic Food, Purity, And Koreans

Jonathan Haidt is a researcher of psychology who has classified human morals in five different categories. Of these five, the one liberals tend to value the least in comparison to conservatives is the one most associated with religion: "purity." But, as Haidt points out in this TED talk (pretty long, potentially fun, but not necessary to the discussion) liberals have this thing for food which they consider "pure." It's the point of this post; why do liberals pay a premium for stuff that's classified "organic?"

Please read this piece before continuing.

As Dunning points out, industrial organic fertilizers and "synthetic" fertilizers are almost identical. Run-off from conventional farms can feed algal blooms, but if organic farms are big enough, their run-off can, too. And even though some organic fertilizers decay and release the principle three elements slowly, if the soil and plants they're with don't integrate all of those elements, there'll be run-off just as with conventional farming. Finally, USDA organic farmers are allowed to use raw manure to fertilize land for crops. We know what that can lead to. (Gotta avoid those scary "synthetic" fertilizers!)

On top of this, some non-USDA organic farmers use blood meal, which is a by-product of slaughterhouses. It's just dried blood, which when added to water is used as a fertilizer; when it's sprayed dry on plants, rabbits won't eat them. Think of the Venn diagram of organic eaters and vegetarians. Surely, lot's of overlap. I don't think these vegetarians realize that to avoid using scary "synthetic" pest controls, some organic farmers are spraying dried cow blood on plants and rabbits. Funny.

But it just gets sillier. Here's a paragraph from the legislation defining USDA organic foods that describes verboten material:

The term “synthetic” means a substance that is formulated or manufactured by a chemical process or by a process that chemically changes a substance extracted from naturally occurring plant, animal, or mineral sources, except that such term shall not apply to substances created by naturally occurring biological processes.

Question. What's a "naturally occurring" cow? Modern cows are bred to produce milk at a high rate and are probably unable to thrive in the "natural" world. What's "naturally occurring" wheat? Almost all grains are bred to have little relation to the grasses from which they originate in nature. Fruit today (including organic) is very different from anything occurring before humans started cultivation (key section from 00:43 to 01:10).

But the most ridiculous phrase is "chemical process." Our bodies and all other things biological are just masses of chemicals whose interactions are mediated by genes. Look at this chart describing a key process in all life. It's just chemicals being processed by catalysts! To an organic eater, when a company produces fertilizer in industrial quantities it's a scourge unfit for organic human consumption. But not all industrial chemical processes are dangerous, and the green revolution caused by the Haber process and similar industrial techniques is correlated with some of the greatest gains in human lifespan. Organic eaters have no good reason to think that the Haber process is unsafe.

Conclusion: there are few differences between organic foods and conventional foods. In a double-blind test you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and you're not earning more Gaia points by eating organic foods.

Conclusion 2: some cultures are more honest about their obsessions.

Free Market Darwinian

Liberals describe free markets in terms of evolution: "survival of the fittest... " and whatnot. It clouds their thinking, because in evolution the two principle factors are genetic drift (which produces new arrangements of genes) and natural selection (which kills off the less able arrangements of genes.) But free-markets don't shuffle and select amongst arrangements of genes; they shuffle and select amongst arrangements of memes. If a once-productive car factory closes and all of its workers get fired, its all because of a change of memes. The factory is no longer producing enough cars with the right features at the right price to convince consumers to pay for the cost of running the factory. What it uses is being wasted (labor, electricity, metal... ) because other factories or companies have a better arrangement of memes such as: newer tech, a corporate culture that's better at team-building, better engineering, etc. So those that produce more for consumers for less money with less waste prosper while those that don't... get new jobs.

Nobody dies.

(Unlike with natural selection).

Which is why it's asinine to refer to free-market capitalism as "red in tooth and claw." Losing a job sucks, but if a market is not clotted with government regulations, a new job is just around the corner. The thing that sucks more than losing a job is being stuck in a world where other peoples' jobs are protected by governments (through subsidies to Chrysler maybe? through growth of the government sector?) because memes are not then being quickly rearranged. They're being ossified. Twenty years ago we were all using cassette tapes. In twenty years I want whatever I'm listening to to make the mp3 seem as anachronistic as cassettes do today. The best way to achieve this, and equivalent improvements in other sectors, is to allow for maximum shuffling of memes.

Industrial-Strength Safety / My Review Of Fight Club 2

Not really... but the last time I saw this movie I was a corporation-fearing liberal/socialist/progressive, so "Fight Club" looks a lot different this time.

This is the movie's key dialogue, because without the misery of his job (with its fluctuating sleep schedule and amoral cost calculations) The Narrator would not birth the alter-ego Tyler Durden:

"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field: A. Multiply it by the probable rate of failure: B. Then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement: C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't do one."

"Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?"

"You wouldn't believe."

The women he's talking to is horrified. Hers seems like the right response to "the formula" but it's not.

Even cars that are well designed and manufactured will have occasional dangerous flaws. Auto recalls can easily cost tens of millions of dollars. If you buy from a car company that performs a recall every time there's the slightest chance of a rear differential locking up, you have to pay for a share of all of those recalls. So there's a trade-off between safety and price: cars from recall-happy producers will cost you more (and possibly a lot more) but you'll be less inclined to die on the freeway. And the obverse.

As a consumer, you should want your car company to use some version of "the formula." All it is is a way to balance safety and price (which includes X, recalls, car production costs, etc.) on an industrial scale.

Still think the "formula" is a bad idea? In a crash two major safety factors are weight and size. This is because the severity of accelerations in the crash is what leads to injury, even if everyone stays in his seat and nothing ends up stabbing or crushing anyone. So if you crash into a big, unyielding tree while driving at 45 mph (assuming you stay in your seat) you only have the distance from the bumper to whatever element of the car the tree eventually ends up wedged against to go from 45 mph to 0 mph. The longer the hood, the more potential crumple zone and the greater the distance of deceleration. Now, this is complicated by a head-on collision with another car. In that case, a big and heavy car is a bonus. The heavy car will have more momentum, so it will push the light car backward (unlike the unyielding tree) meaning that it will decelerate more slowly. The light car driver will be toast.

So, if the safety/money trade-off of "the formula" is so inherently evil, everyone who's enraged at this corporate amorality and greed should never trade safety for money. So why do people buy their kids used $3000.00 Geo Metros instead of the $35,000.00 mid-size Acura TL?

Single-Payer Syndrome

President Obama wants a single-payer system. Barney Frank says that a "public option" is a necessary step to an SPS. Listen to left-wing talk radio (Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartman, Ed Schultz, etc.) and the message of the host, the lackeys, guest hosts, and almost every caller is that an SPS is the goal, a PO can lead to it, or (because they're confused) that a PO is an SPS. One of the most amazing claims is that a PO will act as needed competition with all of the current insurance companies.

(There is no way that all of these insurance companies are colluding in this country, requiring a government monopoly-buster. Blue Cross is not part of some health insurance OPEC.)

What's clear is that liberal America wants the Canadian system, or something very similar. A system where everyone has pretty equal coverage and no one pays for his own care directly. If they want cheap, steadily improving care, then they shouldn't.

High inequality of health care is good and necessary. Without it we will be much worse off. When new technologies/services reach the market (GPS systems, media players, laser eye surgery, car "improvements") the initial buyers tend to by richer, smarter, and savvier than late-adopters. These early products are buggy, expensive, and sometimes useless. As newer versions reach late-adopters, they've been refined and the methods by which they're produced better routinized. This means that late-adopters gain by the pain and loss of pioneers... and any time the rich/savvy will volunteer to be Guinea pigs, you know you have a working system. Early adoption is status-seeking and sometimes pays off, but the safe way to buy new tech or services is to wait.

Consider the PC. Early adopters got something like this (or worse). It was a marvel then, a paper-weight now, and cost over $4000 (inflation-adjusted) for the 4K RAM model. Wal-Mart sells a laptop for $300.00 now and we'll probably see netbooks near $100.00 in less than a year. These price drops and improvements are the result of a market much closer to free than the one Americans supposedly have in health care (with 46% of it paid for by governments.) Why do liberals want to avoid voluntary markets for health care? I think it's because they prefer slow improvements if everyone has equal care.

The CEO of Whole Foods was channeling Milton Friedman when he wrote his recent article. The Friedman piece is long, but describes how even George Bush could get things right once in a while.

And SPS advocates keep espousing price controls as a good way to drop prices. Lunacy. As the Friedman piece points out, we got our crummy current system as a result of price controls, and we all know that with price controls you often get some version of this. Just because the negative consequences of price controls in some markets are not as visible as those for gas doesn't mean they aren't there.

Finally, SPS advocates allude to the small minority who are uninsured. If they really care about this problem, they can voluntarily contribute to a fund to produce a liberal insurance company (not-for-profit, of course) and wipe this problem out. Politically active liberals spend their time figuring out ways to force people they don't like to pay for fantasy programs instead of just solving problems themselves. The time spent scheming at Daily Kos could be channeled into non-coercive solutions (like, why not just make DKos into a primary planning/funding site right now?) but it never is. Why is that?

Variations On The Baby Drop

Video 1.

Video 2.

V1 has the biggest single advantage, which is that the babies are tossed not once, but twice (due to the rebound) and caught with some panache. But the babies are unclothed, and I was raised by dour Christians who don't approve of public nudity.

In V2 the babies are fully and ostentatiously dressed (as are most in the crowd) but the babies just land with a splat. I'm not sure what imprecations the Baby Drop Guy was yelling in V1, but the tone and final call make it sound as if he's running some kind of auction in this one.

If "MTV Sports" had run this the lead-in would have been, "Air! Baby! Punjabi!"

What two words alliterate, describe a non-existent liberal problem of today, and usurp the tone of a non-existent conservative problem from the '60s?

Regarding inner-cities:

"Nutritious food is becoming a luxury item and increasingly inaccessible to an ever larger number of people," Adam Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington's Center for Public Health Nutrition, has said

Dean Ornish (Bill Clinton’s much-ignored health consultant) has shown that the principle way to avoid or stave off most of the killers of Westerners (such as atherosclerosis and diabetes) is to adopt a diet which:

Is comprised mostly of beans, vegetables, fruits, and grains
Uses simple sugars and animal-derived foods sparingly
Avoids trans-fats and other freakish fats

This is not news and Dean is not alone in his conclusions. Bill Clinton’s bigget problem is that he never put down the cheeseburgers, but if he’d heeded Ornish’s message he would have avoided much pain.

So, let’s address the quote with a hypothetical low-income, low-mobility grandmother who lives in Seattle close to the corner of S Orcas St and Renton Ave S, has no car, is not car-pooling, doesn’t know mayor Nickels, has undependable friends, and can‘t carry very much. How does she stock the larder?

Bus to the Cash-N-Carry at 1915 21st Ave S. Cost to her: 30 minutes, short walk, and her bus pass.
Buy 25 lb bag of brown rice, 25 lb bag of lentils, one gallon peanut oil, 10 lbs onions, 10 lbs potatoes, and 1 lb bacon (some people seem to need meat, and bacon is noticeable even in tiny amounts)
Cost: $65.00?

Cab home: $16.00 (11.00 for fare and 5.00 to bribe the driver to carry the groceries inside.)

Now, what has she bought for $71.00 and 1.5 hours of moseying/shopping? About 100,000 fairly healthy calories, enough for a sedentary person to live off of for two months. Obviously, this is not the only food she would eat, but it could easily be her primary stock and would require few additions. Even if she has no one else to depend on, if she uses the simple method of bussing to and cabbing from, she can buy lots of foods from restaurant supply stores that last for months in a closet/pantry and large bags of frozen vegetables which last for months in a freezer from any lame to reasonable grocery store. Pedestrian produce like apples and bananas can be found anywhere, including 7-11s.

So, who would eat like this? I would, and have, and prefer to. After October of ‘08 I decided I wanted to have months worth of food around in case of three contingencies, and ate for several weeks foods like:

Potato lentil soup:
1 cup lentils
4 cups water
1 medium onion (small chunks)
1 medium potato (big chunks)
2 t Better Than Bullion (approximately)

Simmered or pressure-cooked until the lentils are al dente. Finished with lemon and black or red pepper. This is one of my favorite foods.

Brown rice with frozen vegetables, garlic, soy sauce, lima beans, navy beans, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, or many other choices.

So, this Drewnowski character and anyone else who says something about an American inner-city like, “nutritious food is becoming a luxury item…” is bucking for grant money or a job, is a liar, or is a satanist. In America, the only things keeping people from healthy groceries are their parents, their own choices, or the inability to round up an average of a few dollars daily (at most) from somewhere or someone. We don't need "federal New Market Tax Credits" to close the "Grocery Gap" or any other subsidy to provide food. All that's required is ten minutes of thought from a reformed liberal and the will to eat well.

Swap Paradigms: Because If The Only Way To Maintain Your Worldview Is To Never Seriously Consider A Different One...

When you care about politics you spend a lot of time arguing with people. Once in a while you'd like to convince them that you're right (unless you just enjoy arguing) but this never seems to happen.

Why?

The biggest reason is confirmation bias; we only seek evidence that supports our current beliefs instead of evidence that counters these beliefs. So, in 2003 you may have witnessed "arguments" that went something like this:

Dave: "Now that Saddam has allowed the inspectors in and we've seen all of his palaces, old weapons factories, and weapons caches, it's looking as if Saddam doesn't have WMDs."
Barry: "But Saddam is blocking the exit of some of the families of his WMD scientists. Saddam must have WMDs."

Dave: "Now that we've been in Iraq for several months and have found absolutely no WMDs, I think it's time to admit that this WMD thing was a mistake."
Barry: "We've only been looking for six months and we found some shell that had sarin at some point! If you don't support the war, then you don't support the troops."

In the first, Barry responds normally; if your opponent makes a good point, rush past it, make a weak counter-assertion and restate your point. FOX news is all he watches, he has a poster of George Bush over his bed, and Bill Kristol is his favorite intellectual, so he's not hearing much counter-evidence and he's not interested in it when it's offered. In the second, Barry is probably in pain because FOX news has promised and not delivered to him proof of WMDs many, many times. But he is still convinced that Saddam had them, so he implies that Dave is a traitor. Barry has one goal: to maintain the mindset Bush put him in prior to the war.

So, how do we sidestep this confirmation bias? With a paradigm swap.

A paradigm swap can be something as simple as a trade of Wikipedia entries. I'm a born-again libertarian (ex-socialist) and I think that most government regulations are superfluous, impoverishing, or were enacted only to enrich allies of legislators. So, I would trade this entry for whatever entry a progressive thought made the best pro-regulation case. Then, we would read our respective entries (which, at first, would probably look like heresy or gibberish) and actively seek ways to integrate our opponent's model into our lives. We'd agree that the next time we talked, instead of arguing for our own respective views, we'd discuss the strengths of the opposing views. We'd mention instances where the opposing views best described something. We'd try to make better cases for our opponents' views than they did. This seems way more interesting and useful than the usual jousting.

I want to test paradigm swaps because I've found that liberals don't just believe that my politics are wrong, but have never heard the best evidence or have badly misunderstood it. They often can't describe the push and pull of greed and prudence associated with "profit and loss." They're convinced that free-market capitalism is brutal but have never considered how much governments coerce people in comparison to how much corporations do. I'm willing to assimilate much Zinn or Krugman if it will convince some smart progressive to consider this and how it could apply to single-payer health care.

How far could a paradigm swap go?

It could go as far as:

Paul Krugman (or some other liberal intellectual) arguing for purely free-market health care while Bob Higgs (or some other extreme libertarian) argues the side of single-payer health care.

You getting your Republican uncle to read Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky in exchange for you reading Skousen's Economic Logic.

You reading every post of John Stossel's for a week while your libertarian friend reads every post of Matthew Yglesias'.

But it probably makes more sense to swap short entries or mental models.

This sounds kind of interesting, but what are the problems?

How about:

You (a liberal) do a PS with some libertarian and you really try to understand his viewpoint, but when you speak again, you notice that he can't fairly describe yours. Clearly, he didn't take it as seriously as you did.

So, he's a jackass and you don't talk about politics with him going forward. Congratulations, you have the moral high ground!

Reading stuff you disagree with can be frustrating or migraine-inducing.

Sure, but you know that a reliable co-swapper is going through the same thing, will soon prove that he understands you, and may actually concede that you're right! That would be swell. Alternatively, you may permanently shift to his paradigm, which could be embiggening.

All is well.