Sunny is our cat. Laurel found the faux Egyptian bookends at an estate sale and I cleaned them up and set them out to dry.
Previously on Necessary Facts
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Sunday, April 10, 2022
Daysmith Coffee
It is nice to see vendors in the store again in the wake of the continuing Covid concerns. Derek and Daniel, founders of Daysmith Coffee, were set up at the Wheatsville Co-op.
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| https://drinkdaysmith.com |
From their website:
COFFEE + BENEFITS
Our mission at Daysmith is simple: to transform wellness with everyday goodness. That’s why we make delicious coffees that combine the benefits of vitamins and plant-based nutrients to support your health and power your day
GOODNESS
It all starts with our ultra smooth coffees and creamy oat milks. We know taste is number one, so we've taken our time to perfect our recipes with ultra smooth coffee and creamy oat milk to maximize deliciousness.
All our coffees are infused with vitamins and plant-based nutrients to provide targeted benefits and support your health.
LESS IS MORE
We pride ourselves on what’s IN our cans, just as much what we’ve left OUT of them. While other coffees are loaded with calories and sugars, we’ve cut them down. All our coffees have only 15-70 calories and 0-5g of sugar per can.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Awesome Austin Foods at the Wheatsville Co-op
Crisp Greens at the Wheatsville Co-op
Salsa Showdown: Jaime's versus Royitos
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Astronomy: Two Minor Books for the Backyard
There’s a lot of books out there for backyard stargazers. Amateur astronomers with some experience tend to recommend a few favorites with longevity.
- Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis (Cambridge University Press; five editions 1989 to 2019);
- Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe by Terence Dickson (Firefly Books; four editions 1989 to 2019);
- and The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer (Firefly Books; four editions 1991 to 2021).
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| Starwatch by Ben Mayer (New York: Perigee Books, 1984). |
In a layout favored by book designers in the 1970s Starwatch by Ben Mayer offers two unique teaching aids for learning the night sky. The author shows how to construct “starframes” from clear kitchen wrap stretched on coat hangers bent into rectangles. Scaled with the illustrations in the book you can hold the frame up to the sky to find constellations and the deep sky objects within them.
Mayer also shows how to build a projection system that he calls a “problicom” for revealing new objects that have appeared on successive nights. His system requires two slide projectors. Mayer also insists that you can take pictures of the night sky with a standard 35mm camera and a 50mm lens. That being as it may, it is true that with a different machine on the same principle, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Modern technology offers other solutions but the method is sound.
Those two projects open and close the book. Most of the book is a tour of 25 constellations in the northern night sky. The rest of the book is about celestial coordinates, comets, meteors, adapting to the dark, and other standard topics. For the constellations, every layout includes a classical artistic drawing, a guide to estimate the location, the geometric arrangement of the stars, and a list of interesting targets for your telescope.
The Stars : The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos by Robert Dinwiddie, et al., delivers a solution to an esoteric problem with all books: we project a spherical sky onto a flat page. This criticism came up on the Cloudy Nights discussion board as a reason not to give a planisphere to a child. I reject the criticism but I understand the point. The illustrations in this book are spherical projections. Those prints are also pieces of a puzzle that could be reproduced, cut and pasted onto a sphere. Also included are call-outs to favored targets: the Messier objects (of course), binary stars, and so on.
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| The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos by Robert Dinwiddie; David W Hughes; Geraint H Jones; Ian Ridpath; Carole Stott; Giles Sparrow (New York, New York : DK Publishing and London : Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2016) |
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies
Vectures: Monetizing Urban Transportation
Monday, March 28, 2022
Recent Astronomical Observing
We bought this home in part for its larger backyard and better views of the sky. Nominally, we are still under Bortle 7-8 conditions with the Milky Way not apparent naked eye. However, the high wall around the yard does block a lot of neighborhood lighting.
Messier 47 First View (18 March)
I participate in the Cloudy Nights discussion board. Thanks to Voyageur responding to the topic "Underwhelmed" in the Beginner's forum, I found Messier 47 in Puppis, 18 March 2022 at 2047 CDT. I viewed it until 2120 using different oculars with my ES 102-mm f/6.47 refractor - 32mm and 14mm with and without a 2X Barlow. The 14mm (82 degrees) alone was best. I counted 40, then 50 stars.
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Initially, I was not sure if the target was M47 or M46. They are physically close. However, after I came in, I read Wikipedia and the two are distinctly different in view. I did sweep the area several times but did not find Messier 46 that night. I did find it later.
Messier 80 First View (20 March)
I found M80 where I expected it, below beta Scorpii (Graffias, a complex system that I see as a binary), and Antares, about halfway and somewhat inward to the body of the Scorpion. It stood out as a classic globular cluster, a "puffball" with a somewhat brighter center but not to be resolved into individual stars with the small aperture and low magnification (D=102mm; 32mm and 14 mm; 20.625 and 47.14 X). Nonetheless, it was a find and I attribute my success to beginner's luck. Also on the same morning, I first found the small open cluster NGC 6231 near zeta Scorpii. A week later, the mornings were warmer and I sketched the view.
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The allegedly easier Messier 4 does not appear easily in my sweeps near Antares. Reviewing my logs I located it on 14 July 2015, 11 and 13 June 2020, and 31 July 2021. I found it again on 26 March.
I revisit familiar objects such as the open clusters Messier 44 (“Beehive”), Messier 7 (“Ptolemy”) and Messier 22, in addition to double stars such as Castor (actually six; only two are available for small telescopes), and mu Scorpii, among many others. I am happy to find again targets that I previously logged such as M6 (“Butterfly”) and Messier 28.
Dubhe alpha Ursa Majoris (23 March)
With 32 mm and 14 mm (20.6 X and 47.1 X) oculars I checked Dubhe one of the Pointers in the Big Dipper for a companion star because of the ambiguity in my references. Wikipedia says that it is a spectroscopic binary. Sue French (Celestial Sampler) says that it is "easily split" with the companion 380 arc-seconds away.
At 20.6X using a 50-degree Tele Vue Ploessl eyepiece the active field of view is 2.42 degrees or 145 arc-minutes and I did see another star in the FOV. That was also true with the 82-degree Meade 14-mm eyepiece (yielding 1.74 degrees = 104.5 arc-min). I thought that this was far too wide to be a gravitationally bound binary, but was only another star in the field.
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However, I had it all along. I just did not have an intuitive grasp of the measurements. I know that 380 arc-sec is 6'20" but I did not relate that to Mizar-Alcor which is an easy standard. Mizar and Alcor (“Horse and Rider”) are the center stars of the Handle of the Big Dipper. In a small telescope, they resolve easily to a three-star system with a binary companion close to Mizar. After using the 14-mm Meade (82-degree) and the 7-mm Nagler Series 1 (50 degree) and drawing those views, I put in a 40mm (SvBony Ploessl) which was a mere 16.5X and the companion was there. I checked Burnham’s Celestial Handbook and he provides an orbit and a separation of 12000 light years.
Messier 46 First View (25 March)
I finally found Messier 46 at 2212 hours. After a half hour of sweeping the area where I expected to find it near Messier 47, I came inside and re-read the instructions in Sue French's Celestial Sampler. I had been making the same error as Messier: I was searching ENE instead of ESE. (The cluster was temporarily lost to the archives because Messier transposed two coordinates.) With the 32-mm TeleVue Ploessl ocular for 20.625X, I counted perhaps 20 stars in the center using averted vision to see some and another 20 all around the periphery. Overall, the open cluster is not as sparkly, bright, and attractive as Messier 47. But there it is.
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| Messier 22 in the east top of Sagittarius is a familiar target. |
Messier 81 “Bode’s Galaxy” First View (27 March)
The sky was exceptionally clear for my location. The small, open cluster at the head of Orion, near lambda Orionis (Meissa) stood out. Knowing where it runs, I could almost see the Milky Way. Following instructions on Cloudy Nights posted by Migwan—diagonally across the Bowl of the Dipper, continue the same distance—it took about ten minutes to locate M81. It appeared as a bright-ish round patch with a bright-ish center. I viewed it until 2117. I did not find the nearby companion galaxy M82. When the sky clears later in the week, I will go out again and search.
Observational astronomy has an epistemological foundation: understanding what you are looking at better enables you to see it. One comparison for myself is junior high school woodworking: cut with a saw; take it closer with a file; finish it with sandpaper.
Recent Astronomical Research
As an editor for the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society, I usually dragoon other people into writing for the monthly webpage. Recently, I assigned myself several articles. "Planets Have Rings" (here) appeared earlier this month. I am now writing about Agnes Mary Clerke. In July my topic will be the discovery of stellar x-ray sources.
I am awed by what we can achieve now versus what was being done 100 years ago. In Problems in Astrophysics (1903), Agnes Mary Clerke reported on the suggestion of "dark matter." So, even before quantum mechanics informed astrophysics, they were piecing together a coherent view of the cosmos. And they were doing so with instruments far inferior to today's commercial off-the-shelf technology. This photograph was captured by an amateur colleague. Expand the view and you can see a jet of light extending from the lower edge of the galaxy.
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"The elliptical galaxy M87 is the home of several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole and a family of roughly 15,000 globular star clusters. For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy contains only a few hundred billion stars and about 150 globular clusters. … The jet is a black-hole-powered stream of material that is being ejected from M87’s core. As gaseous material from the center of the galaxy accretes onto the black hole, the energy released produces a stream of subatomic particles that are accelerated to velocities near the speed of light." -- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-87
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Red Shift: Six Years with Astronomy
Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe
Measuring Your Universe: Alan Hirshfeld’s Astronomy Activity Manual
See also:
Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Microscopy
I took up a new hobby. I bought microscopes from ShopGoodwill.com and some prepared slides from Amazon. I was happy to be able to take some pictures with my cellphone using my Celestron NexYZ adapter. The first foray was easier and more rewarding than my attempts at astrophotography. In both fields, my primary interest is in verifying for myself what I read in books. I also benefit from the discovery or revelation of facts not perceived in daily life.
Based on my experience in astronomy, I sought to avoid early mistakes by finding a discussion board that I could rely on and participate in. The astronomy board Cloudy Nights has a forum for microscopy, "Cloudy Days." There, I found a recommendation for Oliver Kim's Microbe Hunter website (here), YouTube videos, and discussion board (forum).
Kim has an MSc in microbiology and teaches high school biology. I found his narratives interesting, informative, and objective. Some others have complained that he is salesman for his favorite brands. I have not found that so. He does insist that quality and price are on curves and that the average person can find a good-enough microscope for a few hundred dollars or less. I found these two for under $75 each with shipping and handling. (I searched for 1-cent shipping and Buy Now versus bidding.) I still hold to my longterm goal of buying a Zeiss university classroom instrument for about $1000 when the time comes for me to upgrade. That will depend on my learning curve.
I also bought books, of course. I have an instructor's edition for a survey class in microbiology, a couple of lab manuals, and two handbooks on microscopes.
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| Onion rind |
Picking up where I left off 60 years ago, I found vegetables a lot easier to work with. The sets of prepared slides were not expensive and for that reason were also not carefully prepared. I am not big on bugs, but I could do (and have done) a better job. The specimens are mashed and tangled. So, the next step will be to buy slides, slips, and mounting fluid. (I confess to being a little shakier now than I was at 12 years of age and I think that I can focus past the intentional tremor.)
I do appreciate the unity of life. One of the prepared slides is "Lily Ovary." Miss Lily's ovary speaks to the astounding multifarious expressions in complicated matter since the invention of sexual dimorphism. A science fiction story could consider a watery world in which all of the single cells share communication and thereby constitute a self-aware intelligence. The extent to which the cloned daughters would vary could be a plot element if not the story line. How is difference perceived--and is it accepted--when just about everyone is almost exactly alike?
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| BAMBOO |
Be that as it may, in the mean time, my new toys need cleaning. I have Zeiss fluid and other tools. However, I hesitate to disassemble the oculars and objectives. When I started in astronomy, I had a Celestron 130-mm (4.25-inch) Newtonian reflector. It came with a 20-mm and a 10-mm oculars. A little later, I bought the Celestron Lens-and-Filter Kit that I saw several others with at my first star party. I could not get a filter to screw into the bottom of the 20-mm, so I unscrewed the top--and was rewarded with a handful of small glass lenses. Fortunately, it is a known problem and Celestron has a page on their website on how to put it back together. But it was never the same. I got the faces right, but the axial rotation was off. They are supposed to be circles, of course, but at that level, they are not perfect circles and a little bit makes a difference. So, I have to decide whether and to what extend I want to pay for the lessons being presented here.
That also impacts another toy, truly a toy, an Educsope. It cost less than $15 from Goodwill and came with a kit of tools and slides. But the stage will not stay up. From an old Tasco microscope set that a neighbor gave me some years ago, I already know this to be a problem with cheap microscopes that kids use. I can take it apart easily. Whether I can clean and tighten the rack and pinion is another question entirely. I actually did that with the Tasco. It works better now. The Eduscope is all plastic and does not hold much promise.
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
World Peace Through World Trade
I stopped at Walmart because they have the best organic salad greens in a box at a price even lower than Whole Foods. Usually, it is a quick trip. This time all of the scanners near the groceries were gone and in their place were large boxes. After paying at a cashier's station, I took some snapshots.
Waiting to be uncrated Each is half a unit. Made in India. Over 7000 lbs of convenience.
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| The half that we consumers care about was made Mexico. |
Previously on Necessary Facts
World Peace Through Massive Retaliation
Awesome Austin Foods at the Wheatsville Co-op
Sunday, March 6, 2022
Invite Russia to Join NATO
The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that we have no collective memory. The failures in Iraq and especially Afghanistan were evidence of that. Now, a war in eastern Europe came into the news like a tropical storm and newscasters are already impatient that it has dragged on for a week. Basically, we do not know what it is like to harbor a 1000-year grudge. And that informs our weakness regarding China whose gerontocracy executes petty criminals in order to harvest their organs. China has a 300-year plan and the people who formulated it intend to see it through.
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| Old times there are not forgotten. Saints Cyril and Basil brought Roman religion. Alexander Nevsky defeated German invaders. |
Meanwhile, in Europe, we Americans think that whatever the situation was in 1990 was set eternally even backward in time. We toss out proper nouns like “France” and “Germany” that obscure the histories of Burgundy and Champagne, Saxony and Swabia and a hundred other locations which themselves were only the places where nomads ceased wandering. Andulsia in Spain was the new home of Germanic Vandals (Vandalusia) and even today, in Spanish, your brother and sister are not rooted in the Latin (frater and soros) but hermano and hermana: your Germans. So, as much as I enjoyed sharing Yule Brenner as Taras Bulba with my Ukrainian chums in junior high school, I have to ask: What makes the Ukraine a nation? And what makes it worth killing and dying for?
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| The extension of Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries |
The long and deep truth is that Russia faces West because the East has little to offer, except stunning landscapes, Mongols and Tartars. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Moscow became the Third Rome. Peter the Great was a welcomed visitor in England (which was not yet Great Britain or the United Kingdom). He brought savants of all kinds, (Leonhard Euler for one) from Europe to his new capital. That continued in the 19th century. Friedrich Georg Struve of the Pulkovo Observatory also went by his Russian name: Vasily Yakovich Struve. That trans-national association continued even when another Struve was in charge of the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
The Communist Revolution changed the relationship between Russia and the West. They set themselves apart as the enemies of capitalism and were not surprised when the UK and USA invaded. To get out of World War I, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding the Ukraine and the Baltic States. That was superseded by the Versailles Treaty, though Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland became recognized (by the Allies) as independent nations. Poland became a nation (again). Czecho-Slovakia and Jugoslavia were created from the Austrian empire. (They broke apart after 1990 because they had no reason to be unified.) Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria had fascist or pro-Nazi governments. Hungary sent troops into Russia alongside the German invaders. With the defeat of Germany, Russia protected itself with a wall of puppet states.
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| Borders are fluid. Left to Right: 1914, 1942, 1945 |
In response, the USA and the UK created NATO, which, oddly enough included Turkey. Not bordering the North Atlantic, Turkey had been an ally of Germany and then technically neutral until August 1944, finally declaring war on Germany only on 23 February 1945. During the Cold War, the USA placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In response the USSR put missiles in Cuba. And America was outraged.
It is important not to fall in to moral relativism or equivalency. It makes a difference who rules. Liberal democracy means free trade and free minds. The Ukraine was a relatively benign place once the Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych was removed by the Revolution of Dignity. Russia has seldom been a benign place no matter who ruled. Benign neglect was the best that the Romanov tsars could deliver.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the point is made that the incessant three-way wars are not intended for conquest or even victory, but as excuses to terrorize their own peoples into obedience. As O’Brien says to Winston Smith: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” When Donald Trump was President, he was friends with Vladimir Putin and China was the enemy with virus bioweapons. I did not vote for Trump, but I knew that if Hillary Clinton were elected, Russia would become the new enemy and we would be friends with China.
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| Russia has nothing to lose. |
It just seems to me that the war in the Ukraine could have been avoided. Russia did not want the Ukraine to join NATO. That is easy to understand. One solution could have been to bring Russia into NATO. Open Russia to the West. It is really all they ever wanted.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
War is Good for Absolutely Nothin’!
Book Review: The Second World Wars by Victor Hanson
Reflections on Haldeman’s “Forever War”
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Unscientific American
I did not renew my subscription to Scientific American because it has devolved into a platform for collectivism. It is not merely the political agenda. Politics rests on epistemology and Scientific American has abandoned the scientific method and replaced it with authority opinion.
In fact, science was presented that way 100 years ago. A scientist (professional or amateur) submitted their paper and if the journal found merit in it, they published it. Footnotes and references are the modern style. It can get excessive. In my review of The Invention of Enterprise for the now defunct Libertarian Papers (reprinted here), I took issue with an avalanche of citations to validate an obvious fact. Erring in the other direction, authors in Scientific American assert the hypothesis rather than offering evidence and Scientific American now publishes empassioned pleas for an intellectually bankrupt political agenda.
I have been thinking this through for over a year. I subscribed in 2020 because Covid closed the University of Texas and I (among very many other independent scholars) lost my library privileges. Subscribing to Scientific American (as well as Sky & Telescope) bought access to their archives. For Scientific American that was highly important.
Today's left wing slant was obvious and I just ignored it. The science articles were still respectable. Evidence of that was in the January 2022 issue, which carried an article about the Antikythera Mechanism by Tony Freeth. However, the same issue carried “Inside America’s Militias” by Amy Cooter. The first was a technical report for the general reader who is interested in science but uninformed on this topic. The second was one person's self-validation of beliefs she formed before she began her university education.
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| From Dr. Amy Cooter's curriculum vitae. |
Both were personal narratives. Freeth has devoted decades to studying, writing, and lecturing about the ancient computer. His article in this issue included many references, citations, and pointers to the works of others. Freeth has puzzled over the Antikythera and invested careful, questioning thought to the many problems it presents.
Cooter cites two people who agree with her, or with whom she agrees. Unlike Freeth, she did not come to this research with an open mind. She is not necessarily wrong in her basic facts, only in how she weaves them into a scripted oratorio.
It is an easy claim that the militias, being traditionalist are also masculine. The affinity of men for weapons is obvious by inspection. Benign sexism is a consequence of that. As a guy who has served in uniform, I assure you that protecting women and children is not open to question. At that same time, I served with, alongside, and under the command of women. I never had a problem, though I did report up the chain to inform the leadership about other men who did need some corrective counseling on the subject.[1] It is a known situation.
Dr. Amy Cooter does admit that the right wing militias do have women in command. In her January 2022 Scientific American essay, she wrote: “There are a few women who fully participate in militias, and because of their activity they tend to be well respected and rise to leadership roles. (Jessica Watkins, leader of an Ohio militia who was arrested for her participation in the Capitol riot, is one example.) Still, most militia units have a culture suffused with casual misogyny.” Personally, with my master’s in social science, if I were considering a doctorate, I would find the subject of women in command of traditionalist militias more compelling research than the observable truth that boys like to camp out and play with guns.
Like Cooter, I grew up Republican. My introduction to libertarian versus traditional conservative ideology came at the 1965 convention of Young Americans for Freedom. There, I met conservatives who were opposed to the draft and to the war in Vietnam. I also had to come to grips with the fact that many of my comrades on the right were racists who believed that Negroes are substantially different from and inferior to us white folk. I found that attitude repugnant and distanced myself from the people who asserted it.
So, when in college, I turned hard to the left, I also found it easy to parse the many, many varieties of socialist theory, including the distinctions among British Labour and Social Democrats, Lenin, Trotsky, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the American Marxist, Daniel de Leon and his Socialist Labor Party. Much later in life, I came to understand how left wing syndicalists became the anarchists of the Spanish civil war and right wing syndicalism became fascism.
Understanding those nuances led me to ask why the same people who decry the insurrection of 6 January 2021 were silent during Occupy Wall Street. I admit that it is a rhetorical question.
The final failure came in a special supplement for March 2022. Under the rubric “How COVID Changed the World” by senior editor Jen Schwartz, the lead article was “A Microbe Proved That Individualism Is a Myth: Humans evolved to be interdependent, not self-sufficient” by Robin G. Nelson (biological anthropologist at Arizona State University). Nelson builds her hypothesis from an inventory of complaints:
“For countless Americans, there was a dull but persistent pain to prepandemic life: high-priced housing, nearly inaccessible health care, underresourced schools, wage stagnation and systemic inequality. It was a familiar ache, a kind of chronic hurt that people learned to live with simply because they had no other choice. Faced with threadbare safety nets and a cultural ethos championing nationalist myths of self-sufficiency, many people did what human have always done in times of need: they sought emotional comfort and material aid from their family and friends. But when COVID-19 hit, relying on our immediate networks was not sufficient. Americans were gaslit into thinking that that are immeasurably strong, impervious to the challenges people in other countries face. In reality, our social and economic support systems are weak, and many people are made vulnerable by nearly any change in the capacity to earn a living. The fallout from the pandemic is an urgent call to strengthen our aid systems.”
The thesis fails from unnamed collectives: “countless Americans … people… many people… Americans… people in other countries… many people...” It offers not a single measure, no statistical survey, no validated polling.
I point out that nationalism is not individualist. I might accept that the myth of personal self-sufficiency may be found nationwide. I must insist that nationalism denies personal self-sufficiency and insists on the integration (or total absorption) of the individual into the nation (as defined by its self-identified leaders).
And individualism is not a myth; it is fact of life.
"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable." On my blog here.
People who receive intense family care and people who benefit from the highest levels of professional medical care in a hospital still die. They give up. The time comes when you decide. You make the choice that no one else has the right to make for you. And every moment of every living day, you decide to make the best of your life, regardless of your circumstances.[2]
Moreover, during the pandemic, hobbyist markets have flourished. In amateur astronomy, we found sales exploding. Millions of other people returned to reading, walking, and other pastimes. These are personal pursuits, edifying and enjoyable. Millions of parents learned to get along with their own children and to appreciate the teachers on whom they previously had inflicted their brats. There was no shortage of the very family life which the collectivists had long complained that work outside the home was destroying.
I confess that I had to read the introduction to Nelson's phillipic several times over several days before I understood “gaslit.” Then just to be sure, I googled it. It is a neologism, a trope from a 1944 movie that only became vernacular in popular writing from about 2016. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting.) That being the assertion, who then is the villain? Who is robbing the unnamed collectives and what is being taken from them?
Ultimately, you can only steal from individuals. That speaks to a deeper fallacy: the stolen concept. You cannot have theft without property: even a landlord is debarred from transgressing the renter’s “quiet enjoyment.” Quiet enjoyment is an economic value that can be stolen. So, what is missing here? And while it is theoretically possible that lacking any other motivation except your pain your landlord could set up loudspeakers and blast Wagner into your home, it would be bizarre. Most landlords only do things that make them money or prevent losses. So, who is getting the money from gaslighting Americans into believing that we can make decisions that result in our happiness? Are the perpetrators Runner's World, Sky & Telescope, and Papercraft Essentials?
Speaking to the deeper point, if engaging in new hobbies makes us happier and perhaps morally better, is it gaslighting? I think that we are being gaslit into believing that we are unhappy in order to rob us of money to pay college professors at public universities who tell us that we really are unhappy despite all evidence to the contrary. (For some point-counterpoint on the subject, put "happiness conservatives liberals" into your search engine.)
Social facts being complicated, it is also true that many people did and do suffer from the strain on the healthcare system: the providers themselves. Their plight does not appear in Robin G. Nelson’s article. (See "The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine" by Ayn Rand.)
She does not parse those dominant ideologies. One of them was collectivist. Way back then, correctly stated individualism would have ended slavery and recognized the property rights of the people who were here first. Collectivist thinking based on incorrect epistemology caused those evils and many others. In point of fact Article I Section Nine of the Constitution contemplated the end of slavery after 1808 and allowed the imposition of a tax on the importation of slaves until then. As the Supreme Court ruled in a different case: The power to tax is the power to destroy. Apparently, since this nation’s inception we were intent on destroying slavery, and that is why we eventually fought a civil war over it.
As for the Native Americans, as long as the trespassers were only individuals who chose the harsh frontier over the comforts of village and city life, the Natives usually won any battles. They struck hard and terribly. The theft of their lands was possible only because of the collectivized action of a central government that had no intention of keeping its promises. That is quite different from the bourgeois ethics of individualism.
One way or another, we all have bootstraps. It is true that some inherit their very nice boots including four generations of wealthy African-Americans. (See Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. In an episode of The West Wing, the staff writers are in a quandary over Republican resistance to escalating the estate tax because it also would penalize the first generation of African-American millionaires.) Envying them and being jealous of their status will not provide you with the intellectual tools required to make your own or to pull yourself up by whatever you do have. Some of the answers are hidden in books like Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rich Dad Poor Dad and Benjamin Franklin’s collected aphorisms published as “The Way to Wealth.” You can read about Madam C. J. Walker, Maggie Lena Walker, Steve Jobs, or Steve Forbes.
From reading the theories of the arch-capitalist economists of the Austrian School, I am willing to believe (provisionally) that financial success is ineffable: it must be learned and cannot be taught. Working hard is absolutely required and yet alone is not enough. Knowing the principles of accounting may be necessary but insufficient. Finding a thriving market or a floundering one that will reward nurturing may both be exploitable alternatives or failure modes.
Nelson closes her complaint with a demand: “Committing ourselves to upholding our evolutionary mandate to help one another—not just the people we see every day but everyone everywhere—is the only thing that will save us.”
If helping one another is our evolutionary mandate, then it must be beyond our choice. If it is not, then by what standard is it required by evolution? Evolution required that people who have diabetes live long enough to have children and we have people with family names like Drinkwater and Passwater. Yet we are investing billions of dollars to overthrow that evolutionary mandate.
- https://professional.diabetes.org/research-grants
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26798117/
And that is just Type 1. It may well be the case that the other types are remediable and preventable with common sense diet and exercise. Or would Professor Nelson prefer that we follow our evolutionary mandate to let the infirm die off lest they degrade the gene pool? In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski tells of the Bakhtiari tribe who even in modern times leave behind any individual who cannot by their own power cross a swollen stream. The right answer to that question begins with the assumption of individualism: each individual is important to the survival of the tribe, including (and especially) the one who does not want to belong to any tribe.
Tribalism also underlays Amy Cooter’s essay. The militias are clearly tribal and define themselves in those terms of “we versus they.” Yet within that is a strong strain of individualism, self-dependence and self-sufficiency. Dowsing the militias with the individualism they recognize would defuse their desire for collective action. Instead of storming the Capitol, they would “go Galt” and just leave the society that has rejected their values. I suspect that Amy Cooter, Robin Nelson, and the editors at Scientific American would not be happy with that and would prefer that everyone just go along with their plans.
Notes
[1] Reflexes speak. There was one time working security, we made regular bank deposits, pretty much the same time, same place, unarmed and unarmored. I was in the bank with my partner, being vigilant and the left side of my brain said, “If guys with guns came in right now, I would knock her to the ground and cover her with my body.” And the right side of my brain said, “Marotta, she would knock you down and cover you because is the better officer.”
[2] It is fully consistent and epistemologically integrative that Dr. Robin Gair Nelson extols the tribal values of the Navajo Nation for their immunization campaign. Apparently, those individuals were unable to make the right choices. Unlike the WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational, Democratic), the Navajo Nation has no tradition of individualism.
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The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
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