Grim's Hall

The Devil You Know

2012-01-26T23:48:00.004-05:00

...When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

Ron Paul Gets the Best Lines

2012-01-26T21:07:00.000-05:00

Watching tonight's debates, I have these impressions:

Ron Paul gets all the best lines. He's still not a serious candidate, but man it's fun to listen to him talk.

Rick Santorum is playing it straight, but there's nothing flashy about his answers. They're honest, though. He's probably not helping himself by hammering all the things he's not going to do for people. There are some applause lines associated with these things, but... well, I hope it works. His answer about his wife was fantastic.

Newt Gingrich gives the best answers across the board. Whatever else there is to be said about him, the guy knows his stuff. Whenever they come after him, he knows just how to turn it around. When Romney came after him for promising stuff state-by-state, he gave a great answer. He also took a couple of moments to give kind words to Dr. Paul over his age and health, which was courteous.

Romney just said he'd like to fire someone again, but the audience didn't seem to mind. His answer on health reform was pretty good. "Groundhog Day" was a good line; interesting that he followed it up by saying that "we know what it takes to get you back to work." We? Good for you, governor.

UPDATE: Santorum's answer about faith was very good. 'The Constitution is the how of America. It is the operator's manual. The why of America is the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.' His was the most unapologetic endorsement of faith in public life.

UPDATE: Hot Air disagrees that Gingrich was strong; I thought he turned the knives very well, but it's true that Santorum went after Romney more. But see for yourself:

Romney neutralized him on the big immigration exchange at the beginning, and then it fell to Santorum — for the second debate in a row — to pick Romney apart on his core policy vulnerability. (He did a darned fine job of it too.) If you’re operating under the illusion that the election will turn on the presidential debates in October, kindly explain why Gingrich is somehow superior to Santorum. He wouldn’t even accept Blitzer’s invite to hit Romney on his Swiss bank account even though he’s been criticizing him on the trail for it for days. The hapless moderator/punching bag had to practically badger him into answering. I don’t get it. Didn’t he realize that the primary was on the line tonight?

You’ll be pleased to know that Romney is now a 91 percent favorite to win on InTrade as I write this, up from 74 percent earlier today. Stats guru Nate Silver thinks it’s possible that Romney wins by double digits, perhaps as much as 20 points. And why not? After Santorum’s strong performance tonight, there are bound to be tepid Newt fans and true undecideds who prefer him as the anointed Not Romney to Gingrich. Who could blame them?

Be nice to see the boy do well.

Speaking of Character

2012-01-26T14:24:00.000-05:00

...our VP definitely is one.

UPDATE: Apparently FOXNews decided to change their headline on this one, and the URL changed with it. The new page questions whether Biden faked an Indian accent, rather than asserting that he did. I'm leaving the old link up, though, because as Sly says, the 404 page is amusing in itself.

A Problem from the Rhetoric

2012-01-26T14:11:00.001-05:00

Aristotle makes a claim in the early part of the Rhetoric that seems like it ought to be the case, and yet is clearly out of order with the facts on the ground here in America today.

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. This kind of persuasion, like the others, should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak. It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.

That seems like it ought to be right. Yet in our current Presidential contest, we have one man who is apparently good by general standards, which is to say Rick Santorum, the lowest-polling figure in the race; one man who is apparently not good, but who is a highly effective speaker, which is to say Newt Gingrich; one man who may or may not be good, but is a terrible speaker, which is to say Mitt Romney; and one man who is said by some to be good and others to be wicked, and by some to be a great speaker and by others to be a terrible one, but who is currently the actual victor of the last Presidential contest.

I say that Romney 'may or may not' be of good character; Cassandra is quite sure he is of excellent character, and his personal life seems to be clear of the usual problems, but I can't quite figure him out well enough to decide what to think about his motives.

Aristotle's next argument ends up making perfect sense from our contemporary perspective.

There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and describe them, to know their causes and the way in which they are excited.

There is a clear failure for Romney on point (3). Thus, assuming the man to be of excellent personal character for the sake of argument, we can still appreciate how he might fail to be persuasive. He lacks one of the three basic components of effectiveness in persuasion.

Newt clearly has (1), (2), and (3) down. His reasoning is good, he understands human character and goodness (even if he often fails to practice it), and he knows how to excite the emotions.

Thus, we would expect Newt to prevail in a two-man contest of persuasion: he's simply better armed. This will prove to be true in the fall as well: when imagining a Newt v. Obama match-up versus a Romney v. Obama match-up, we can see that the President will fare better rhetorically in the latter contest. He would be facing an opponent who simply lacks access to a third of the power of persuasion.

We still have the puzzle of goodness, though. I have always found that speaking the truth is the greatest weapon in rhetoric, and that good character and a name for honor is -- as Aristotle holds -- a powerful weapon as well. That does not appear to be the case for us today.

Does this mean that Americans do not care about good character, or that they disagree about what it is? Or is there something about our electoral process that makes character less persuasive than it normally tends to be? If the latter, what is the cause of the failure?

Mass Grave in England

2012-01-26T13:09:00.001-05:00

Now a University of Cambridge researcher is putting forward a compelling new theory about the identity of the murder victims. The documentary follows Dr Britt Baillie, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, as she examines the remains, as well as documents from the period and other material evidence, to reopen the file on what happened in Dorset a thousand years ago.

While historians will probably never agree conclusively about who the men were, Baillie’s analysis draws her to the conclusion that they may have been Viking mercenaries who modelled themselves on, or behaved in a similar way to the legendary Jomsvikings – a brotherhood of elite killers whose strict military code involved never showing fear, and never fleeing in the face of the enemy unless totally outnumbered.

Allegedly founded by Harald Bluetooth, the Jomsvikings are thought to have been based at a stronghold called Jomsborg on the Baltic coast. At a time when Vikings were feared across Europe, they were known as perhaps the fiercest of them all – a reputation which even earned them their own saga.

Uh, Oh, I'm a Cultural Elitist

2012-01-26T11:06:00.002-05:00

I'm no Pauline Kael, but I guess I'm not exactly a woman of the people, either, according to this Pop Quiz inspired by Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." I get a few points for having done a little manual labor and having once ridden on a Greyhound bus. On some questions you get credit for your spouse's activity, such as buying a pickup truck, but for hunting and fishing I guess it counts only if you do it yourself. Well, at least I have friends who are evangelical Christians and/or who disagree with me profoundly on political issues. So my score is "You can see through your bubble, but you need to get out more." I could have done better if I'd ever sat through an Oprah show or watched last year's Transformer movie. But no credit for enjoying Jeff Foxworthy? For frequenting Sonic drive-ins?

I knew I was in trouble when out-of-touch Michelle Obama took flack for buying Tuscan kale in a local farmer's market. We grow Tuscan kale and think it's great stuff.

H/t Ace of Spades.

Can This Be Right?

2012-01-26T10:56:00.003-05:00

Inflation adjustment is a little tricky, but this still seems like a strange claim:

However, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post finds that controlling for inflation, in fact George Washington would be the nation’s richest president.... In today’s dollars, Washington’s net worth would amount to more than $500 million.

I'm not after the basic claim of the article, which is that we've had a lot of presidents richer than Romney would be if elected. What interests me is the claim that George Washington was fantastically rich. I had never gotten that concept from readings of history. What I thought I understood was that he began quite modestly, as a surveyor -- I've been to places he surveyed, including the town in Virginia that now bears his name. His marriage to Martha Custis brought him some wealth, and his status as a war hero made it possible for him to obtain more, but I thought he was in debt for a long time after that, nearly until the war started.

That seems to be in accord with the Wikipedia article, which notes:

After retiring from the presidency in March 1797, Washington returned to Mount Vernon with a profound sense of relief. He devoted much time to farming and other business interests, including his distillery which produced its first batch of spirits in February 1797. As Chernow (2010) explains, his farm operations were at best marginally profitable. The lands out west yielded little income because they were under attack by Indians and the squatters living there refused to pay him rents. However most Americans assumed he was truly rich because of the well-known "glorified façade of wealth and grandeur" at Mount Vernon. Historians estimate his estate was worth about $1 million in 1799 dollars, equivalent to about $18 million in 2009 purchasing power.

Eighteen million dollars is still quite rich, but it's nowhere near $500 million. Is the Washington Post as bad with numbers as everyone else in D.C., or is there some way of making sense of the claim?

A Man or a Mouse?

2012-01-26T09:41:00.004-05:00

It seems many Americans perked up when they heard Mitch Daniels's opposition speech after the State of the Union, prompting a heated debate over whether a dark horse could enter the race at this late date. At Pajamas Media, Ron Radosh explains some of the pros and cons of this gambit, but it's the comments section I find most interesting. I had forgotten that Daniels cited his wife's opposition as his reason for giving up the campaign, and that his wife had left him to marry her high school sweetheart, then returned to remarry him ten years later, after he'd earned millions of dollars. To many voters, this apparently marks him as a Beta Man unsuited for the Oval Office.

I don't doubt that that's a common reaction. It's not quite mine. His wife's high school sweetheart was a California plastic surgeon who ditched her after a few years in favor of a younger model. The picture I get is of a woman who made a horrible mistake by choosing a flashy passionate poseur, then came to her senses and realized that the stolid father of her children was the real man. To her great good fortune, he still cared for her and wanted to repair their family. In my eyes, that makes her a reformed liberal, and it makes him a strong man who knows his own heart. There's someone home in there. (Contrast with Ace's piechart of the most common reasons for supporting a candidate:)

Anyway, it's a narrative I prefer over the guy who keeps screwing around on his wife, marrying his mistress, and then doing it again.

What the heck is the matter with the GOP that it can't produce a candidate with a nice, conventional home life who also knows how to translate his personal, economic, and political principles into coherent policy proposals? You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Then I wake up when I read sensible advice like this from commenter "Patrick in Atlantis":

We’re trying to thin the field out, not grow it. If Daniels get in the race now, he’ll have his you know what handed to him. You don’t like any of the contestants? Too bad.

Elberton

2012-01-25T23:39:00.003-05:00

Elberton, Georgia, is an interesting place. The wealth of the city is based on granite, quarries, that sort of thing. But the history is important.

We went to the McIntosh Coffee shop. Nice place. Good prices for lunch, if you wanted lunch.

Georgia's district tartan -- recognized by Scotland's King of Arms, on the sidebar -- is based on the MacIntosh tartan. I guess a lot of folks don't know that anymore. John "Mohr" MacIntosh -- that is, 'John the Great' -- was brought to the south of Savannah after the '45. He was there with Oglethorpe for the wars that kept Georgia and the Carolinas for the English, against the Spanish.

The post road has run through there since the Washington administration. It's kind of funny to think that we're looking at the end of the postal service, and to remember just how long it's been around. Not that long: two hundred years and change. It was new in France in the 1600s; Dumas made a point of the novelty in The Three Musketeers.

Took My Own Advice Today...

2012-01-25T23:28:00.003-05:00

Went out to detox from the internet. The few little towns around here are pretty disconnected from the internet-world, as demonstrated by our most-local pet store:

Hey, I didn't make it up! I just took the picture.

Do I Hear Twenty Percent? Going Once...

2012-01-25T20:25:00.002-05:00

Maybe We Need a Brokered Convention to Get This Guy Back in the Race

2012-01-25T09:30:00.003-05:00

From Mitch Daniel's rebuttal to the 2012 (as well as the 2011 and 2010) SOTU address:

An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.
The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.
Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say "First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love."

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Private sector jobs. That's where everything starts, and that's what everything else hangs from.

The Roman Internet

2012-01-25T09:26:00.002-05:00

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a surprising historical metaphor for the difficulties we face in making good use of the Internet.

The metaphor is Nero's court, and the model for success is one Gaius Petronius Arbiter. He is supposed to be the guide for how to deal with these massive feasts without being numbed by them. The model is better than the others around Nero's court; and yet, as the end of the piece shows, ought to be deeply alarming. Decadence has a high price for even the best human soul.

I'm thinking about this in terms of last weekend's forced detachment from the world. Along about Sunday, I realized that there must be some interesting news about how the South Carolina primary had gone -- the matter was much debated the week before, and here it had been over and done with and I had no idea how it had turned out. Instead I was rereading a work of history on an old Anglo-Saxon blood feud, and enjoying it. I had forgotten the author's insights into how Northumbria was divided, and how that fit into the question of feuds and politics in the generation before the Norman Conquest.

It may be that the real answer is not in refinement of decadence, but in periodic detoxification. I like to take to the road at times in the year, and go for a while into the mountains or some wilderness. It is always good, but much of the year it is not available -- we are expected to remain connected at all times for professional reasons. I have managed to resist this more than many, but even I feel often required to be abreast of the situation, the latest detail.

The table groans, and so do we.

The End of the Grand Old Party

2012-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00

Foreshadowed tonight in a comment by a "Top Romney Advisor":

So the argument here is that party elites will let you vote for Romney or, if you won't, they'll simply remove the decision from your hands. Romney won't get their nod, and neither will Gingrich, nor anyone else who has won delegates out of the votes of the people. The party and not the voters will decide.

The Democrats got this result in 2008. Do you remember? The debate was over whether some states -- Clinton-won states -- would be allowed to vote their full slate, or if they would have to accept limited or no participation in the convention. Then-Senator Clinton's campaign made a big deal about counting every vote. When the convention came, though, she took the Secretary of State position instead of forcing a contest; and they ended up counting none of the votes, but nominating then-Senator Obama by acclamation.

We have watched the capture of the Democratic party by public-sector unions, the vastly rich corporate powers that support the unions, and their dogs in the New Class who make up the leadership of the Occupy movements. It's destroyed a party that meant a lot to America over the course of its history; it meant something to me. I fought for it for a long time, even in twilight.

I've never been a Republican, and the fate of that party is of no special interest to me. All the same, it seems like someone ought to say this: the Republican party isn't like what the Democratic party has become. If they pull the trigger on this, and set aside the voters for the will of their internal elites, they will lose everything.

This is because the base of the Republican party is middle America, and middle America won't accept this. The success of the Gingrich campaign to date is predicated on their hatred of the party elites. Deny them the power to vote for their leadership and their representatives, and they will come looking for heads.

Perhaps that is for the best. What we need is a genuinely populist revolt against the political class, and the removal of all those who rest in easy seats of power. Perhaps in the aftermath of what was once the Republican party, we can build a movement that will break the chains of eighty years of submission to the state, to the powerful, and to the guidance of those said to be wiser than we.

Wergeld

2012-01-23T23:32:00.000-05:00

Can we agree that, if a man kills someone's family pet over a political campaign, and that man is later hunted down and killed, we will all pledge not to convict the killer of any crime if asked to serve on the jury?

Living in bubbles

2012-01-23T16:32:00.002-05:00

Charles Murray has a new book out, and an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizing its argument. He maintains that the richest and the poorest Americans are more isolated from the rest of their culture than they were 50 years ago. He suggests that, for their own benefit, they'd both do well to break out. To the inhabitants of the decaying low-income, low-education areas, he recommends:

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

To the sheltered inhabitants of the "SuperZIPs," those giant gated communities near New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, he recommends rethinking their priorities:

Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Most people won't listen to Mr. Murray. In order to strip out results that can be explained by ethnicity or racism, he looks strictly at statistics relating to white people. His ideas in this new book, like the ones in the past several, will therefore be dismissed as racism.

Something like the same sorting trend was described in Bill Bishop's 2009 "The Big Sort," a book that I found unsatisfying. Bishop was persuasive in his statistics about the clumping of like-minded communities, as revealed in fine-grained analysis of changing voting habits over a number of election cycles. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to know what to make of the data, other than to bemoan the increasing difficulty of civil discussions about deep political disagreements. Also, while he thoroughly understood why nice people would naturally congregate in progressive neighborhoods in his own in Austin, Texas, he seemed a little bemused about what all those Americans in red precincts could be thinking.

Mr. Murray, in contrast, has done a lot of analysis over several decades about how much more efficiently our education system now works to sort out Americans by I.Q. I was surprised to read (in "The Bell Curve"), for instance, how relatively recently the Ivy Leagues began moving toward a fairly strict meritocracy. Before 1960, they demanded a moderate minimum level of scholasticism and then mostly sorted by money and class. Back then, the brightest students from flyover country were far more likely to attend local schools and stay in their home towns performing a variety of jobs, rather than gravitate to Wall Street or the Mayo Clinic as they tend to do today.

Our neighborhood is very mixed in education and income. We like it that way.

Cruise liner

2012-01-23T10:36:00.003-05:00

The Net brims with explanations of how Romney could have blown South Carolina, but as usual my favorite comes from Mark Steyn:

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive. . . . Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

Well, if he loses the nomination, maybe Romney can shoot for EU president.

P.S. -- but I'll still vote for him if he wins the nomination. A.B.O.

Rainfall

2012-01-23T09:54:00.004-05:00

Due to the torrential downpours of the last several days, we've been without phone or Internet since Saturday. It's working currently, but it's also still raining, so we'll see how long it lasts! The rain has also made some of the local roads impassable, meaning that I've had the interesting experience of being entirely shut off for the world for a few days.

Did I miss anything?

Crazy

2012-01-19T20:19:00.004-05:00

Cassandra reminds me in the post below that it's been too long since I did something really wrong. A man has to sin once in a while, or else he'll get to feeling self-righteous, which is the worse sin than the sin he put off.

So here. It's for the health of our souls.

You think that's bad? Try this:

An Interesting Day for Republicans

2012-01-19T12:02:00.002-05:00

It looks like Newt Gingrich is about to have his best day on the campaign trail...

...and also his worst.

It's rare to get so many big stories all at once. It's hard to say how it will shake out. Here are a few possibilities:

1) Gingrich is right to say that his marital problems are old news with voters, and the endorsements of his former rival and the 100 TEA Party figures push him over the top in SC. As the new consensus TEA Party candidate, he goes on to challenge Romney with the solid backing of the more conservative wing of voters.

2) Republican voters don't like people who screw around with their marriages, meaning that today's new allegations sink Gingrich. Herman Cain shakes his head in sad sympathy as Gingrich is destroyed by the allegations.

(As to which: Why is the headline that he asked for "an open marriage"? The arrangement is hardly unheard of, especially among the rich and powerful; surely if he had honestly approached his wife with his feelings, and accepted her firm "no," we would take this as a minor sin -- or, these days, even just a quirk -- brought on by a robust nature. The problems facing Gingrich are that he got around to asking only after he'd already begun enjoying an 'open marriage'; and that, rather than accepting "no," he divorced his second wife for his third.)

There are three sub-cases:

2a) Gingrich's fall, just as conservative sentiment had lined up behind him, collapses conservative morale and allows Romney to walk to the nomination.

2b) Gingrich's falling numbers causes him to bow out of the race, endorsing Romney as a way to salvage what he can for his political future with the Republican establishment. While many of his supporters will never accept Romney, enough follow his lead to end the nomination contest.

2c) Conservatives swap their allegiance to the last non-Romney in the race, Rick Santorum, who was just announced to have actually won Iowa after all. Only three states having voted so far, there remains a real race for the nomination.

So, the first breaking point is whether we get scenario (1) or one of the sub-cases of (2). We'll know that pretty soon. If it's (1), Santorum -- who seems the best of the remaining candidates to me -- probably has no chance of success. If it's (2), and Gingrich endorses Romney, Santorum also probably cannot overcome the combined weight at this point. If it's (2) and Gingrich does not endorse Romney, we'll see Romney win anyway unless there is a quick and decisive shift to Santorum. Even then, he'll be under significant disadvantages of money and establishment support; but perhaps he can make a fight of it there.

Sadly, none of that is in Santorum's hands -- as they say in the NFL, at this point he does not control his own fate.

Troll Valley

2012-01-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have just finished reading Lars Walker's Troll Valley, which is available for the Kindle and for the Nook readers. Since we have the benefit of Mr. Walker's company, I really ought just to suggest that you read it, in the hope that we might have the pleasure of all discussing it together.

The book treats the integration of myth into modern life: both the pagan mythos of Norway and Norwegian immigrants, and Christian myth. That this is meant to be of contemporary interest is demonstrated by the "present day" characters who frame the book, but the action takes place mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the story, a child with a fairy godmother grows up to lose sight of her, and the myths that guided his childhood. In the process he becomes a vile and unpleasant man, under the guidance of a mother who becomes ever more domineering and destructive to her own family. The mother, actually, is one of the most interesting characters. She embraces the prohibition movement allegedly out of a desire to "do good," but over time we see that her real interest is in control. She uses prohibition to force her husband's father into submission within his own house; then, she moves into new fields of progressive thought -- eugenics, vegetarianism, and the lot -- to force the old man out of the house entirely. Finding sparks of resistance remaining in her eldest son and husband, she cranks up the embrace of these intolerant philosophies until she has driven everyone out, and can bask in her role as a woman who has sacrificed everything for Prohibition and Temperance.

There is a wider lesson to her example. A family home is like a broader human community in that it has rules that establish a way of life, and under that way of life a community is possible. We see in the early chapters how the traditions of Norwegian families at Yuletide sustained a broad community through hard work. It is at that feast that the mother first uses her power to force a change in the rules, in her interest and against the interests of others. It is by forcing continual alterations of the rules of life that she destroys the community within the house, so that finally no one can live with her at all.

Each of these rules is meant to represent moral progress, but each of them destroys the living community in which human kindness is possible. The living spirit of the community is broken by the rules themselves, and in the climax of the book -- when the mother tries to wield her church group to destroy a young woman who dared to taste beer and dance at a wedding -- we find the broader lesson. That part, though, you must read for yourself.

I will say no more at this time, but if you are interested, I would be happy for us to reconvene to discuss it once everyone who wishes to join the discussion has had the time to read it. If you would like to join in, let me know in the comments and we'll arrange a time: hopefully Mr. Walker will be so kind as to join in our discussion as well.

What's Killing Manufacturing?

2012-01-18T10:22:00.001-05:00

Via D29, an answer that may surprise:

“Wages?” I ask.

His dark eyebrows arch as if I were clueless, then he explains the reality of running a fab -- an electronics fabrication factory. “Wages have nothing to do with it. The total wage burden in a fab is 10 percent. When I move a fab to Asia, I might lose 10 percent of my product just in theft.”

I’m startled. “So what is it?”

“Everything else. Taxes, infrastructure, workforce training, permits, health care."
...
Take tax policy. Historically, manufacturing was the high-wage sector of the economy -- manufacturing jobs still pay about 30 percent more than service jobs in education and health care -- so tax policy milked it. Manufacturing companies, in the old days, actually paid the corporate income taxes that many others avoided. Commodity producers (oil, timber, agribusiness) lobbied for, and received, federal subsidies, with investors in oil and gas wells simply voiding corporate income taxes on the profits they earned. Banking, retail and services found their own ways around taxes, often by offshoring intellectual property or shifting profit to tax havens. Eventually, manufacturers figured out how to duck taxes as well -- by going overseas.

Yet it isn’t just taxes. Wind turbines, for example, are enormous, heavy and expensive to transport -- so there is a big advantage to fabricating them close to the installation point. But consider the predicament of the Spanish wind manufacturer Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA after it began operations in Pennsylvania. Because the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Transportation wouldn’t establish uniform standards for transporting the enormous turbine blades, each state followed its own rules. Whenever a blade crossed a state line it had to be unloaded by a construction crane and then reloaded to conform to the next state’s specifications.

Against SOPA

2012-01-18T08:46:00.000-05:00

The blackout is in support of the anti-SOPA movement.

An article describes the issue:

For example if you post a link to the story on your Facebook wall. Under SOPA, all of Facebook can be blocked. To avoid this fate, Facebook would be responsible for policing the copyright status of every piece of content its users post. The same happens with search engines, which to avoid being shut down, Google and Bing would be responsible for policing the copyright ownership of every piece of content they index.

That includes Blogger too, of course: we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of this, simply because some other blog on Blogger posted something that was copywritten. How likely is that? I'd have to say the probability approaches certainty.

A Poet Looks at Africa

2012-01-18T08:37:00.004-05:00

Eliza Griswold reports from the edge of Europe, an island in the Mediterranean called Lampedusa. It's an interesting piece, if only stylistically -- being a poet rather than a journalist, Ms. Griswold thinks nothing of devoting an entire paragraph to the question, "What am I doing here?" That liberty is a strength.

The name Misericordia is familiar. I realize I heard it last week when I was with fellow Civitella artists touring the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro. There, in the famous Piero della Francesca triptych, a hooded man kneels at the base of the cross. He looks like a hangman, but in fact he’s a member of this group, Misericordia. While they were doing charity work among the sick and dying, they wore black masks to protect against disease, and to protect their identity so they couldn’t be thanked. I imagine Luciforo in his yellow hazmat suit and a hood.

“Luciforo, what have you seen that you can’t forget?” I ask.

“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea. They popped up like corks,” he says.

The Romney Oppo Book

2012-01-18T08:32:00.003-05:00

By coincidence, it appears that the McCain campaign's oppo book on Romney has been released to the web. Given our ongoing discussion, it might serve as a useful source of information. While it is, of course, an opposition book -- and therefore designed to be harmful rather than sympathetic -- a good oppo book must be tight enough that the candidate relying on it won't look foolish.

One for the Gibbet

2012-01-17T12:46:00.002-05:00

It is possible to ask questions about the recent shipwreck, and we may choose to draw wider lessons or to resist that temptation. One narrow lesson, though, is clear enough: the captain should hang.

The chaos and the deaths, whatever else they are, represent a failure of leadership. They are the direct result of an officer abandoning his post just at the moment when his post was most necessary. If we would have the order we desire in these emergencies, we must enforce discipline on those charged with maintaining that order. The old standard that a captain goes down with his ship had a purpose; but even if we no longer wish to maintain that standard, the captain surely should not be the first man off of the ship, nor should we suffer him to refuse to return to his post.

Chesterton had King Alfred speak of these things to the people who came to him, asking that the king help them restore the order of the world. Alfred replied in a metaphor, using the plucking of the White Horse to explain how all civilization depends on constantly renewing and reinforcing the old order.

"And though skies alter and empires melt,

This word shall still be true:

If we would have the horse of old,

Scour ye the horse anew.

"One time I followed a dancing star

That seemed to sing and nod,

And ring upon earth all evil's knell;

But now I wot if ye scour not well

Red rust shall grow on God's great bell

And grass in the streets of God."

Of Wrath and Goodness

2012-01-17T12:38:00.002-05:00

It is the wise man who knows that the answer to a contemporary puzzle is often best sought in the ancients.

In the Western heroic tradition, the paragon of the humane warrior is Homer's Hector, prince of the Trojans. He is a fierce fighter: On one particular day, no Greek can stand up to him; his valor puts the whole Greek army to rout. Even on an unexceptional day, Hector can stand up to Ajax, the Greek giant, and trade blow for blow with him. Yet as fierce as Hector can be, he is also humane. He is a loving son to his aged parents, a husband who talks on equal terms with his wife, Andromache, and a tender-hearted father. He and King Priam are the only ones in Troy who treat Helen, the ostensible cause of the war, with kindness.

One of the most memorable scenes in The Iliad comes when Hector, fresh from the battlefield, strides toward his boy, Astyanax. The child screams with fright at the ferocious form encased in armor, covered with dust and gore. Hector understands his child in an instant and takes off his helmet, with its giant horsehair plume, then bends over, picks his boy up and dandles him, while Andromache looks on happily. Astyanax—who will soon be pitched off the battlements of Troy when the Greeks conquer the city—looks up at his father and laughs in delight.

The scene concentrates what is most appealing about Hector—and about a certain kind of athlete and warrior. Hector can turn it off. He can stop being the manslayer that he needs to be out on the windy plains of Troy and become a humane husband and father.

To say that it is appealing does not go far enough: it is necessary, and it is the hardest thing in the world. The reason to praise Hector is not just that he got it right, but that getting it right is so very difficult to do.

Reductionism

2012-01-17T10:26:00.000-05:00

Theodore Dalrymple writes of Belgium, in a way that sounds very familiar:

As I write, Belgium has not had a central government for more than 500 days. While I must admit, as an occasional visitor to that country, that the difference between Belgium with and Belgium without a central government is not apparent on casual inspection, this interregnum may take the theory of limited government too far.

The reason that Belgium has lacked a government for so long is that the country is divided into two populations (actually three, but the third is too small to count) with incompatible politics: French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders. Belgium is officially bilingual, yet you see not a word of Dutch in Wallonia and not a word of French in Flanders. The division could not be starker if barbed wire separated the two provinces. Only in the capital, Brussels, does one find any concession to bilingualism.

Historical and economic factors deepen the division between the two regions. Wallonia, though it contained a minority of Belgium’s population, long dominated its culture and economy. Even the Flemish upper class spoke French at home, while Dutch was the language of the peasantry; until recently, Belgian schools forbade children from speaking Dutch in class. With the decline of Wallonia’s coal and steel industries and the economic rise of Flanders, however, the pattern of dominance changed. Flanders went from being the poor relation to being the rich one, albeit with something of an inferiority complex. In the process, it started to make large transfer payments to Wallonia, which suffered from comparatively high unemployment. Such payments rarely promote goodwill between groups. Resentment is common among both the donors, who harbor suspicions that the recipients are exploiting them, and the recipients, who indulge in mental contortions to explain their dependency away.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the largest political parties in Flanders are either nationalist or free-market; both philosophies lead to reducing or stopping the transfer payments. It is equally unsurprising that the largest political party in Wallonia is socialist and wants the payments to continue or increase. The Wallonian socialist party’s patronage powers in its territory are almost feudal in nature and extent; the last thing that the party of social change wants is actual change.

If not quite deterministic, Dalrymple's description is reductionist: the difference between free-marketeers and socialists boils down mostly to which side of transfer payments they find themselves. The principles follow the economics as nicely, on this example, as they ever did in Marx's theory.

I take us all to be a bunch of free-marketeers and nationalists; I assume that most of us are also not receiving any transfer payments from the government. Are we in the same boat as the people of Flanders -- thinking ourselves principled, but really driven by rice-bowl issues? Are our opponents in the same boat as the people of Wallonia, having concocted an idea of "fairness" and "justice" that is really limited to a desire to be paid out of someone else's wallet?

Both sides have elaborate arguments to the contrary. Dalrymple's suggestion is that these arguments are not rational, but rationalizations. What do you think?

The Fat Man

2012-01-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

Since I spend most of my time with ancient and medieval writings, I'm sometimes a little surprised when I run across what contemporary thinkers take to be an interesting puzzle. From the Stanford Law Review, "The Fat Man":

Consider one of the most famous hypotheticals on the subject of self-defense: the Fat Man puzzle. In Fat Man, you find yourself in a small boat at the bottom of a chasm. Although there are many versions, what they have in common is that an enormously fat individual is hurtling down from the cliff. You have no idea why he is falling—whether, say, he jumped or was pushed. All you know for sure is that if he hits you, you die. You have no space to maneuver, and no time to escape. Fortunately, you are armed with your trusty Fat Man gun. You can pull the trigger and vaporize him, thereby saving yourself.

Theorists of self-defense usually posit that killing another to protect the self must be based either on the status of the attacker (e.g., enemy soldier in war) or what the attacker is doing (e.g., actively shooting at you). The Fat Man problem usefully divorces the justification for violent self-defense from the motive of the assailant. Robert Nozick’s original version of the problem stipulated that Fat Man has been pushed, and is therefore morally innocent; thus theories of self-defense that depend on what the attacker is doing (e.g., is he engaged in aggression?) cannot justify the use of the vaporizer.*

And yet the Fat Man problem is in other ways too easy. Augustine, to take an example, would surely have rejected the use of the vaporizer gun, on the ground that your life is not intrinsically more valuable than the Fat Man’s. Liberalism’s refusal to weigh lives against each other also makes calculation difficult. Yet I find that my students have little difficulty with the problem, answering as Nozick intended: they are by and large perfectly willing to blow Fat Man to smithereens to save themselves.

This situation is exactly identical to a non-theoretical problem that we've discussed here just recently: the case of abortion where a zygote is wrongly implanted in the mother. Without needing the machinery of a "Fat Man Gun," we can see that the moral issues are fairly straightforward:

1) Party X is going to be killed by Party Y unless Party Y is killed first.

2) Party Y is doomed anyway.

This case brings out two issues that are important to ideas about the use of force. The first is that innocence is sometimes not a purely moral issue: sometimes innocence is practical. The baby is surely morally innocent, but practically the baby (or the Fat Man) is going to kill someone. Thus, we can consider using force against a kind of target that normally would be exempt from consideration.

The second is one that any ancient thinker would have understood: doom changes moral calculus. We don't have a case here where we can save Party Y. We are either allowing them to die, or killing them ourselves. The outcome for them is not different. Thus, we do our moral work on the issues that we can affect.

Taking action against such a target is a tragedy, but it may also be a duty.

* The footnote here says that "theories that rest on moral culpability would not justify shooting down an airliner carrying 100 innocent passengers and 3 hijackers, when the hijackers intend to fly into a building, killing everyone on board, and hundreds or thousands more on the ground. This is not to say that shooting the airline down cannot be justified; the calculus relies on a combination of consequentialist body-counting and double effect." But this is not correct: there is no need for a "combination" of this sort, because one of the components of the medieval doctrine of double effect is proportionality. Modern consequentialist thinking does not need to be added to make sense of the calculus; St. Thomas Aquinas established standards for dealing with that aspect of the question.

One of Those Ideas...

2012-01-16T19:47:00.000-05:00

So there's this woman in New Zealand who decided to answer her bills by auctioning off part of her backside:

Bids on a cheeky online auction, giving the winner the chance to tattoo an image of their choice on a Lower Hutt woman's buttock, have topped the $10,000 reserve price with a week still to run.Tina Beznec is selling a 9cm by 9cm space of skin on her Trade Me auction "YOUR tattoo on my Bum!!" after being made redundant twice in the past year....

Ms Beznec suggests the canvas is the perfect place for a marriage proposal, business promotion, or an artist wanting to share a design.

She is promising the winner's idea - no matter how outrageous - will end up on her rear.

'Well, that's just a terrible idea,' you may be saying, 'but the world is full of quirky individuals, and one such example is no reason to..."

Breaking Headline: Backside Tattoo Auction Sparks Copycat Craze!

Some ideas the world would have been better off without.

Wicked, Wicked Woman

2012-01-15T19:32:00.002-05:00

Cassandra has apparently decided to begin posting again, in spite of her many previous threats to be done with it forever. You'd have thought she might have mentioned it to us!

150 Conservative and Evangelical Leaders Endorse Santorum

2012-01-14T17:34:00.001-05:00

This has to be very encouraging for the Santorum campaign, and also for any of us whose hope for 2012 lies in consolidating conservative opinion behind a single candidate. While not an "evangelical" myself, and not much given to joining organizations of any kind if I can help it, it's good from my perspective if it helps move people in one direction.

Mr. Santorum hadn't seemed to me to be one of the serious candidates until Iowa, but I wonder to what degree that judgment was improper. It was made based on the fact that no one seemed to take him seriously, plus his infamous Google problem. The latter, though, was a work of viciousness by a character of low morals who ought not to be granted a veto over anything. The former is an unfortunate necessity of democratic politics, because no matter how good your candidate is, he can't win if no one will vote for him. (Not that this usually stops me; I can't recall the last time I voted for someone who won a primary election.)

So, Santorum? He gave a good speech at the Iowa convention, and since I have been paying attention, I like what I see of him. I won't go as far as Mr. David Brooks in endorsing his vision, but I do agree that we need to think about a system that looks out for the interest of those Americans who play by the rules and work hard. Santorum clearly believes in such a system, though it is worth noting that he rejected Gingrich's bashing of Bain capital, and truly groups like Bain are a necessity in a free market economy. Gov. Perry wasn't wrong to call them "vulture capitalists," though -- the positive contribution they make is very similar to the work that vultures do for the world. Any man who spends enough time in the wild comes to like vultures.

I think I could vote for Santorum, all things considered. We have to choose from what is on the table. Of those options, this may be the best.

Dueling Chanters

2012-01-13T23:06:00.001-05:00

The concept is Appalachian, but the execution is Irish enough.

Humans in Big Gatherings

2012-01-13T11:19:00.000-05:00

Interesting infographic.

Another Take on Abortion

2012-01-13T10:41:00.003-05:00

With h/t to Power Line, this image makes one aspect of the question pretty clear. Regardless of where one falls on the abortion question, the grandparents have a large, if not decisive role.

Eric Hines

2012-01-12T17:40:00.000-05:00

What were those Taliban doing in those Marines' latrine anyway?

To put this in a little perspective, In WWII, Marines were boiling the flesh off of Japanese skulls and sending them home to their girl friends.

A Stinging Rebuke

2012-01-11T19:07:00.001-05:00

It's not every day that you see our Supreme Court decide an issue 9-0. On the other hand, given the merits of the case, any other split would have been quite alarming. Though the case revolves around a mundane question of just why a woman was fired -- for cause or for health -- the EEOC's position on what they were prepared to recognize as a minister was outrageous.

SCOTUSblog notes that Alito's separate opinion was joined by Kagan, which is another remarkable feature of this decision.

Good Point

2012-01-11T18:53:00.002-05:00

The "Young Americans Foundation" reports:

Young people today face a three-pronged attack on their financial security—educational debt from their past, unemployment in the present, and a future plagued by the burden of massive government debt. The government is largely responsible for all three problems.

The one that might not be obvious is student loan debt, but government policies have also led to massive increases in it. This is both by making such lending (to youth without capital) easier by subsidizing the process; and also, at the state level, by massively increasing tuition in order to suck up every dime that the Federal government was willing to help the kids borrow.

Government policies, meanwhile, have managed both to over-regulate and under-regulate the economy, resulting in the massive unemployment. Regulations on industry and manufacturing have made it far, far harder (and far, far more expensive) to open a new and productive business. Under-regulation of financial gamesters, as well as political pressure from Congress, allowed for the inflation of the housing bubble.

So, yes, if you're young, government is very much your problem. Any government spending is coming out of your hide, as is the debt created by the past generations. Think carefully about what you really want the government to do.

Perhaps Here Too

2012-01-11T14:16:00.002-05:00

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it.

From Chesterton's A Short History of England.

St. Joan of Arc

2012-01-11T14:06:00.001-05:00

Another event I missed by a few days is Joan of Arc's 600th birthday. The link is to artwork done in her honor; here is Mark Twain's.

Old Hickory Said...

2012-01-10T18:32:00.000-05:00

We're a few days late on this, but only a few. On 8 January 1815, American forces, largely militia, led by Andrew Jackson defeated elements of the most powerful military in the world.

It's a more interesting story than the famous song suggests:

That makes it sound like Jackson won in a walk, against an inept opponent. In fact the British forces were disciplined and supplied with artillery and rockets, and the fighting lasted half a month. It is only the remarkable disparity in casualties that make it seem, with hindsight, like an easy victory.

It's Even Worse Over There Than We Feared

2012-01-10T11:31:00.005-05:00

I've never heard of Ryan Air before, but it sounds like an Irish/European Southwest Airlines on steroids, relying on no-frills flights, unfashionable airports, and a uniform 737 fleet.

Those of us who don't travel in Europe won't be able to take advantage of Ryan Air's many ten-quid flights. That doesn't mean we can't enjoy this guy tearing the European Commission a new one. H/t Maggie's Farm, which gave this talk the appropriate title: "Why the EU Will Never Again Ask an Actual Innovator to Speak at an Innovation Convention." His explanation of why Ryan Air charges a fee for your checked baggage is priceless.

Margaret Thatcher gave the airline one of its early breaks. The entertainingly snide Wiki article gives detail about the wide variety of preposterous suits that have been brought against this innovative airline, which got one of its early breaks from Margaret Thatcher.

The airline's own website is here.

It's Probably Wrong To Enjoy This So Much

2012-01-08T22:05:00.003-05:00

I've got a friend who really, really hates Tim Tebow. I've been enjoying watching him foam at the mouth at various points during the season. He's a huge Broncos fan too, from Denver -- it's really Tebow that he hates, hates, hates.

So, naturally, I just sent him an email.

Woosh...

2012-01-08T15:02:00.001-05:00

...and there goes the Christmas tree, which we left up a little longer than usual this year. I'd normally make some remarks about a long, cold and joyless winter ahead; but lately it's been more like March than January. Daffodils are up, and the frogs are singing by night. I feel like I ought to be able to jump on the motorcycle and take off for wherever with tent and Bowie knife, as the blood suggests in the springtime.

Speaking of Women and Jews...

2012-01-07T22:20:00.004-05:00

...which we were doing both in the last post and in the recent post on Medieval Islamic poetry, Haaretz reports on Jewish prayer from 1471. Just to keep the accounting clear, though both are "medieval" these prayers are several hundred years later than the period in Spanish history in which female Jewish poets were absent (it's also 246 years after Magna Carta, which is to say, a little longer than America has existed as a nation):

According to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the 600-year-old siddur replaces the traditional prayer recited by women, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Master of Universe for Creating me According to your Will”, with “Blessed Are You Lord our God, Master of the Universe, For You made Me a Woman and Not a Man.”

The prayer offered by the 1471 siddur stands as a clear counterpart to the morning prayer recited daily by observant Jewish men: "Blessed are You For Not Creating Me a Woman".

The article runs with this in several directions, but let me offer something from a thinker -- who happens to have been both a woman and of Jewish extraction -- whose approach to this question strikes me as the right one. I'm speaking of Hannah Arendt, who wrote quite a bit about the differences that define us. She has a pretty sophisticated approach, so bear with me as I try to explain it, because I may not convey it quite right the first time.

In her better-known writings, Arendt speaks sharply against those who allow themselves to be defined by others, and brightly of those who seize upon the categories of their birth and use them to construct an identity that is theirs alone. Thus, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp 81-5 in this edition), she has hard words for "inverts" (i.e., homosexuals) and "Jewish" men who hid in salons; but very high praise for Proust and Disraeli, who each took one of those qualities and constructed something worthy of a true individual. In Disraeli's case, for example, he was in no way satisfied with being 'Jew-ish' -- he insisted on being a Jew, and in a way that was his very own.

Her position thus guards against the ravages of our modern identity politics, in which people are taught to think of themselves as members of a group -- she wants you to take whatever your genetic or cultural identity happens to be, and find a way to do something new and unique. The quality of being Jewish or an invert, she says in OT, is "meaningless" when it is a way of putting people into groups: it can only be valuable if it flourishes as a part of the character of an individual of worth.

That isn't the limit of her insight, however. In her letters, she expressed a profound sense of gratitude for every kind of human difference that is truly, genuinely impossible to bridge. It is my belief that you can find her reasoning for this in her horror at the Nazi movement -- which she encountered first hand, arrested by the Gestapo and later spending time in a concentration camp in France. She writes of how Hitler was so proud of the SS for turning a thousand men into 'examples of the same type.' That there are differences we cannot bridge is therefore something to be grateful for: they provide sources of resistance to tyranny.

More than that, though, such differences also provide a unique perspective. This is crucial to our ability to believe in our own perceptions of the world -- after all, our sense perceptions are often wrong. Our eyes may fail us, or we may not be sure we heard correctly. It is in hearing or seeing our perceptions confirmed by an independent observer, another person, that we gain confidence in our impressions. The more independent the observer -- that is, the more genuine and deep the differences between them and us -- the more confidence we can have from their confirmation of our thoughts and impressions.

For that reason, it is right to feel gratitude for being a woman and not a man, and it is right to feel gratitude for being a man and not a woman. It is right to feel gratitude for any difference given to us that cannot be bridged. These things make us stronger, in that they give us access to parts of the world that our own perspective does not, and in that they can help us know how much weight it is safe to place on our own perceptions.

This -- Arendt calls it "plurality" -- is a strength that arises from human nature. Therefore, it is a virtue: one of the absolute ones. It is a virtue for anyone, and a weakness in those who will not have it.

And Here I Thought I Was Old-Fashioned

2012-01-07T21:27:00.004-05:00

House Bill 1580 is the product of such a brainstorming session this summer between three freshman House Republicans: Bob Kingsbury of Laconia, Tim Twombly of Nashua and Lucien Vita of Middleton. The eyebrow-raiser, set to be introduced when the Legislature reconvenes next month, requires legislation to find its origin in an English document crafted in 1215.

"All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived," is the bill's one sentence.

Can we start with getting them to cite the Constitution?

Some version of this concept might be a very good idea, although if you were going to pick one document the Magna Carta is probably not it. A large number of its provisions pertain to issues like scutage, dowries, and feudal relief payments. In general these no longer pertain to how we organize society (although perhaps we should reconsider the feudal system, which at least required that all recipients of government support provide the government with clear public services in return). There are also some disabilities for women and Jews that force us not to consider the Magna Carta as the be-all, end-all of our rights.

On the other hand, there's something wholesome about the idea of requiring the government to prove its claims. Rights language has been abused by those who favor an expansive government role (e.g., 'education is a right!', 'decent housing is a right!', 'health care is a right!', etc). If the Magna Carta is not sufficient by itself, it might serve as one of a list of documents that show a given liberty or right to be well-recognized and of long standing. The protection of rights and liberties of that sort ought to be one of our chief concerns.

For example, provisions 38-9 would be problematic for the administration's current policy toward assassination or indefinite detention of US citizens without trial:

In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

These Are The Worst Pirates We've Ever Seen

2012-01-07T10:07:00.001-05:00

Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, who commands the carrier strike group, looked at the chart and radar images of the Sunshine’s location with something like disbelief. The Sunshine and the Stennis were only a few miles apart. “These might be the dumbest pirates ever,” he said.

It proved a chance to rescue some Iranian fishermen -- a good deed freely rendered to a people who have probably been told to expect no such from us.

Santayana wrote of England at her height as the "sweet, just, boyish master," and -- though there were times and places when England was fierce, and her justice was administered without remorse -- there are many examples that prove his point. Much of what was said in honest praise then can be said in honest praise now, not of England alone, but of our combined navies operating to keep the sea lanes safe and free.

Mama Grizzly

2012-01-06T23:40:00.001-05:00

Shelob vs. the Sandworm

2012-01-06T10:28:00.003-05:00

And glowing red eyes, to boot. Well, they're not actually huge (yet), but they are genetically modified hybrids of silkworms with spider genes added to make their silk stronger. I think the GM engineers added the glowing red eyes just to freak us out.

Some commenters to this "Not Exactly Rocket Science" article raised the specter of escaped silkworm super-hybrids wreaking havoc in the natural world, only to be reassured that silkworms have been domesticated for so long they can't survive in the wild. Oh, sure: that's what they said about the lysine contingency.

We have some friends who raised silkworms long ago in California. They haven't tried it here in Texas; something about the food supply or the climate. Anyway, it sounds at least as wonderful as beekeeping, another seductive hobby. But now it seems my attention is to be diverted by the spiders, and I'm going to have to put my hands on Leslie Brunetta's "Spider Silk," which offers information about the fascinating proteins that make up this amazing substance. (Ha! It's available on Kindle, and I can have it instantly! -- as if I didn't already have a high enough pile of books to read.)

It was a touch of genius to get the silkworms to start spinning spider silk, because they produce their fibers in the more useful form of long, continuous strands wrapped around a cocoon, unlike the tangles favored by most spiders. Someone is even working on worm genes that will impregnate the modified silk with bacteriocides, so that it will make a better wound suture. Can elf-cloaks be far behind? Beanstalks?

Abortion Restrictions Up Substantially in 2011

2012-01-06T10:14:00.002-05:00

It's interesting to me that the states continue to push this point, since SCOTUS has so often attempted to assert that almost no restrictions are acceptable. Nevertheless, I suppose every time you pass a law, someone has to go to the trouble of challenging it in court; perhaps over time they expect to convince the federal courts that an unrestricted access to abortion is not acceptable to the people of many states within the United States.

Also, some of these "restrictions" are just restrictions on who has to pay for abortions. Given the deep moral issues involved, it is surely reasonable to say that no one should be forced to contribute to abortion against their will. That means no taxpayer funding, and it also means that conscience exceptions ought to be thought reasonable. We often hear from the pro-choice party that a woman's right to make a decision on the morality of abortion for herself ought to be respected; but surely we ought also to respect the moral choices of others who are horrified by the practice, and not force them to enable, participate in, or fund what they regard as a killing of an innocent.

Of course, it's also problematic to suggest that a woman's right to choose should be unilateral; it runs up against the common sense notion that it is not wise to allow someone to be the judge in their own case. It is not that people mean to be unfair, or even think that they are judging unfairly; it is just that we all have unconscious tendencies to over-emphasize our interests when we are judging in our own cases. This is a well-known fact of human nature that applies to all people at all times; naturally it applies here as well.

Thus, even though I am sure that most women who go through this decision believe they are carefully judging the matter, it should neither be surprising nor controversial to suggest that these sub-conscious processes lead them to judge their own interests above those of the father or those of the child. The father may or may not want the child, but the child's interest will surely often be best served by being born even if it is then given up for adoption. Sadly, we find that all these new restrictions occur in a context in which too often abortion numbers remain at near record highs, and adoption referrals decline.

Britain Looks Abroad

2012-01-06T09:51:00.002-05:00

Since we were thinking the other day about inviting the UK into NAFTA -- or possibly even forming a wider Anglosphere alliance that was both economic and military -- these remarks from the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs may be of interest. They are from the Bangkok Post, and intended for audiences in Asia, which is also where our own administration appears to believe our future focus should be located.

Our commercial relationships in the region are strongest with our Commonwealth partners, Singapore and Malaysia who between them account for a commanding majority of our bilateral trade in goods. While continuing to strengthen these important relationships we should also be looking for opportunities in Thailand, Vietnam and elsewhere. We also need to continue to work with EU partners to secure free trade agreements with Asean countries which will open up markets and boost trade.

And lastly we need to do more to promote two-way investment. The UK offers attractive investment opportunities for emerging economies. International institutions regularly rate the UK as the easiest place to do business in Europe, with the strongest business environment on the continent and the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship in the world.

Our relationship, however, is about more than trade and investment. We have shared interests in maintaining security in a region which straddles some of the world's most important shipping routes and to tackling together common threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyber-crime and climate change.

The UK therefore maintains a stake in regional security and defence cooperation through our 40-year commitment to the "Five Power Defence Arrangements". This agreement between the five Commonwealth partners of UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand is unique for East Asia and enables our countries to undertake joint exercises and to share information on issues from piracy to illegal fishing. There are a number of separatist or other domestic conflicts within Asean and tensions remain in the South China Sea. The UK has experience which we are keen to share to help promote stability and we are already part of a small group of countries formally supporting the Philippine government and Mindanao groups in their efforts to end conflict in the south of that country.

Externally, the voices of Asean leaders will be increasingly influential in regional and global affairs. Indonesia's impressive democratisation and Malaysia's strong stand against violent extremism are examples of where the experiences of countries in the region can be of great value to the international community.

This may be the way that the future looks, especially as we ourselves are apparently going to cut hundreds of thousands of ground forces and hundreds of billions of dollars from our security posture. That means we need to make sure that the economic interests of our security partners align with our own -- otherwise, they won't play in a game we no longer can play on our own.

Structuring an alliance that is designed to enrich as well as empower an ally suggests being careful to pick allies with broadly aligned cultures and values, as well. The UK is clearly thinking along those lines already; so must we.

The Female Glories of Islamic Spain

2012-01-05T23:25:00.001-05:00

In an article on poets from Al Andalus, an interesting lesson: Muslim but not Jewish women wrote significant poetry. Another, then: women were among the great poets of Islam at the period when it was at its height.

What is surprising is that during this period, there were numerous Muslim women whose poetry has been preserved. Although Muslims refer to the Jews as ahl al-kitab or “people of the book,” Muslim women seem to have been more successful in creating lasting poetic works.

It is rather difficult to account for this discrepancy, for it seems odd to imagine that Muslim women in medieval Spain were far more educated than their Jewish counterparts. Arabic became the lingua franca following the Muslim conquest of the country in 711. When Jewish poets began to compose in Arabic and later in Hebrew, were the women entirely excluded?

There are very few extant poems written by Jewish women dating to this period. Although only a fraction of all poems from that time have survived, this does not mean more were not written. The poems that are available are of a high quality, but the problem of quantity cannot be ignored.

Kasmunah (“little charming one” or “one with a beautiful face”) of Andalusia in southern Spain was the daughter of Isma’il ibn Bagdala “the Jew.” Her Arabic verses were included in a 15th-century anthology of women’s verses (compiled by an Egyptian). Little is known about her; there are debates as to whether she lived in the 11th or 12th century. Some of those favoring the earlier date contend that she was none other than the daughter of Samuel Hanagid, who was also known as ibn Nagrella (he indeed had a daughter). The assumption is that Bagdala and Nagrella are similar enough to have been confused.

At any rate, Kasmunah’s father taught her by means of intellectually creative collaboration. He composed two lines; she needed to respond in kind.

The style he chose is known as muwwashah, a rather difficult genre of poetry in which both he and his protégé excelled. Reading her verses reveals a tremendous originality and expertise in Arabic poetry, as well as the gentleness of this cultured woman.

The wife of Dunash ibn Labrat lived at the end of the 10th century; very little is known about her. Her husband was born in Fez, studied in Baghdad with Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon and spent time in Cordoba in the court of the eminent diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Her name is not recorded anywhere, but this does not detract from the fact that her erudition and expertise in Hebrew poetry are astounding.

In truth, the scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry, such as Haim Shirman and Ezra Fleischer, were convinced that this was a field entirely reserved for men. However, a series of discoveries of fragments from three different collections in the Cairo Geniza produced evidence to the contrary.

In 1947, a fragment of a poem was found and published by Nehemia Allony, who surmised that it dealt with a bride and groom, or possibly a separation. In 1971, the tables turned when a complete copy of this poem appeared (albeit with the lines in the incorrect order); the missing lines revealed that it referred to a couple and their child. The husband had left his beloved wife and child behind in Spain, and their future was unclear. A third discovery solved the mystery of the poem’s authorship because of its header: “from the wife of Dunash ibn Labrat to him.” This fragment included a second poem written by the absentee husband, defending himself and professing his love to “an erudite woman like you” (see Ezra Fleischer, “About Dunash Ibn Labrat and his wife and son,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 5 (1984) in Hebrew).

This detective work revealed beautiful poetry and the correct identity of the sources; it reflected the talents of the eminent poet’s wife as well as that of her husband. Mr. and Mrs. ibn Labrat, although separated, and Kasmunah were creative and impressive poets who made important contributions to the medieval Spanish literary heritage.

Medieval Islamic Spain seems to me to hold much that we ought to try to recover. Modern Islam would find in it much native pride, as it represents the height of their religion's worldwide civilization. The rest of the world would find it a means of helping guide their Islamic neighbors onto a more wholesome course than is sometimes the case.

These End is Nigh

2012-01-05T20:33:00.001-05:00

These boys -- with one noteworthy exception, all boys -- are good for morale. If I believed any of this was true, I'd be feeling pretty good about the future.

Unfortunately, I have trouble buying it. They are taking counsel from their fears, not from wisdom; I do not believe that the danger is nearly as great as they say. More's the pity!

SSgt Reckless

2012-01-05T18:49:00.000-05:00

Bthun sends the story of a war hero who is right up our alley.

There's a website for her, now.

Hip-Hop Music in the Age of Our Current President

2012-01-04T23:53:00.002-05:00

Ya'll may remember the author better from a '90s hit that is still in current play during sporting events.

Same guy. New era. It's gotta be hard for the President, seeing the hip-hop demographic turn on him.

Sorry, Ma'am

2012-01-04T23:43:00.000-05:00

I wanted her to do well. She brought it on herself, but she also made some solid points in the many debates, and advanced some strong arguments on how to think about the Constitution. It's a loss to all of us that she couldn't carry the good parts home.

"Those Hands Dug Freedom For Me"

2012-01-04T20:08:00.003-05:00

A pretty good speech, from last night's real winner.

It'll be a miracle if he manages to overcome the weight of the establishment, and the wealth, that is ranked against him. But he believes in miracles; I suppose it's part of his job.

Rivals in Archaeology

2012-01-04T16:36:00.000-05:00

A little less flamboyant than the Indiana Jones / Belloc feud, but it's close to home.

Thornton declares that an area near Brasstown Bald is “possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and (is) certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.”

Thornton uses Williams’ research on Indian mounds and the studies of archaeologist Johannes Loubser, who excavated the north Georgia site, to bolster his claims.

Williams couldn’t disagree more. “This is total and complete bunk,” Williams wrote on Facebook. “There is no evidence of Maya in Georgia. Move along now.”

Williams’ reaction brought forth legions of bloggers and Internet experts calling him “arrogant” and “dismissive.”

It was certainly the latter!

There are some very interesting prehistoric sites in Georgia, but this is the first time I've ever heard it floated that they might be Mayan. I'd wager that Dr. Williams is right: this sounds more like cashing in on the 2012 Maya-mania than a highly probable theory. Nevertheless, here's the article; the author claims he'll answer questions on his website. Maybe I'll ride up there sometime soon and take a look.

Almost There

2012-01-04T14:06:00.000-05:00

A young Oklahoma mother shot and killed an intruder to protect her 3-month-old baby on New Year's Eve, less than a week after the baby's father died of cancer. Sarah McKinley says that a week earlier a man named Justin Martin dropped by on the day of her husband's funeral, claiming that he was a neighbor who wanted to say hello. The 18-year-old Oklahoma City area woman did not let him into her home that day.
On New Year's Eve Martin returned with another man, Dustin Stewart, and this time was armed with a 12-inch hunting knife. The two soon began trying to break into McKinley's home. As one of the men was going from door to door outside her home trying to gain entry, McKinley called 911 and grabbed her 12-gauge shotgun.
McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO that she quickly got her 12 gauge, went into her bedroom and got a pistol, put the bottle in the baby's mouth and called 911. "I've got two guns in my hand -- is it okay to shoot him if he comes in this door?" the young mother asked the 911 dispatcher. "I'm here by myself with my infant baby, can I please get a dispatcher out here immediately?"
The 911 dispatcher confirmed with McKinley that the doors to her home were locked as she asked again if it was okay to shoot the intruder if he were to come through her door.
"I can't tell you that you can do that but you do what you have to do to protect your baby," the dispatcher told her. McKinley was on the phone with 911 for a total of 21 minutes.
When Martin kicked in the door and came after her with the knife, the teen mom shot and killed the 24-year-old. Police are calling the shooting justified.
"You're allowed to shoot an unauthorized person that is in your home. The law provides you the remedy, and sanctions the use of deadly force," Det. Dan Huff of the Blanchard police said.

The only thing left is to convince the dispatchers that they can tell her it's OK to shoot. Twenty-one minutes isn't unreasonable for a police response time, all things considered. We should work that reality into how we train people to think about cases of home invasion, and how we train 911 dispatchers to advise people to react.

Stradivari v. The Moderns

2012-01-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

This survey itself is not that interesting, but there are two minor points that caught my eye.

A less respectful view of Dr. Fritz’s study is offered by the violinist Earl Carlyss, a longtime member of the Juilliard String Quartet. “It’s a totally inappropriate way of finding out the quality of these instruments,” he said. The auditions, he noted, took place in a hotel room, but violinists always need to assess how an instrument will project in a concert hall. He likened the test to trying to compare a Ford and a Ferrari in a Walmart parking lot.

“The modern instruments are very easy to play and sound good to your ear, but what made the old instruments great was their power in a hall,” he said.

The anti-Walmart snobbery aside, that's a good point. However, I am reminded of Eric Blair's remarks that it is recording -- and not concert halls -- that offer us the real power of music in our current age. Just in the last two weeks, we've listened to recordings of songs that we might not ever have heard before the internet age; now, they're free for exploration.Thus, the "power in a hall" standard may need to be rethought, even by concert musicians. The question may become "How optimized is it for our best current recording and playback techniques?"The other remark that I found amusing was this defense by the study's author:

Dr. Fritz acknowledged that her study used few violins. But it is quite difficult, she noted, to get owners to lend out their million-dollar instruments to be played by blindfolded strangers.

That surely must be true. It must be doubly true that it is hard to get such loans when the purpose of the study is to undermine the legend on which the value of their million-dollar investment is based!

Addendum on National Myths

2012-01-03T00:55:00.010-05:00

I've been away from here for a few days, but was glad to see Grim raising that topic of perennial importance: national myths. The highly successful (the Chinese have one of the most successful national myths in the world; and their beastly treatment of the Uighurs and Tibetans comes along with it), the once successful (for I can dimly remember a time when public schools in this country taught an American national myth, and I've read enough old things to know it was once very strong), and the decidedly troubled.

Now, what Grim's saying in these discussions, and especially in the second one, I entirely agree with. In fact, if I had to pick a single factor that really makes a recognizable "people," a national myth is that factor. A common language helps; a common government helps; a common religion helps; but it is the national myth (that may well be bound up with all these things) that really does the trick.

Michael Totten has two recent posts, highly apropos. To the first. In this and comments, he discusses Newt Gingrich's characterization of the Palestinians as an "invented" people. And he links to this article by Lee Smith, who opines:

"The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is 'authentic,' but whether this particular national fiction is useful."

And I think he is on the right track. Smith however concludes that the Palestinian myth is not "strong enough" because their leadership is unwilling to accept a limited state that coexists with its Israeli neighbors. But I think that is not a sign of the myth's weakness, but simply its character. For better or worse, and mainly for worse, the Palestinians have indeed become a people because they have got a national myth. It's just a barren and ugly one. It is of recent vintage - that is the kernel of truth in Mr. Gingrich's statement (which I used to agree with) - but that doesn't invalidate it. All national myths have got to start somewhere.

In his post and especially in comments, Mr. Totten goes further in opposing the notion of the Arabs as a "people" - which Mr. Gingrich accepts in rejecting the Palestinians as an "invented" subset. And in my view, he's right there, insofar as the Pan-Arab ideologies (Ba'athism, and whatever-you-call-it that was supposed to create the overarching UAR) - didn't catch on; they were unsuccessful myths, and given the character of the regimes that used them, that is probably just as well. Mr. Totten, however, declares the idea not only pernicious ("National Socialism for Arabs") but simply false:

If Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc, stopping viewing the Palestinians as part of some great Arab “mass,” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would instantly become localized and would eventually become solvable. The minute Lebanese people, etc, insist the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is somebody else’s problem, we’ll be 80 percent of the way to where we need to be...Arab nationalism is built on a lie and must die.

And there he misses the mark (as Mr. Smith does not) - the idea that the Arabs should see themselves, and attempt to act, as one people is simply a myth that didn't catch on. (And would, I suppose, have been as perniciously used as Panslavism, if it had.) The preamble to the current Iraqi Constitution is a deliberate effort to foster a national myth in that country - if Mr. Totten's reports in this book still hold, the Kurds are not buying it at all just now.

Anyway, it isn't hard to see that for a country with any kind of consensual government, a national myth is a precious possession - hence the second post, on Claire Berlinski's determination to violate a Turkish law by referring to the Armenian genocide as "genocide," and a French law by denying it was genocide. In these places, I think, and especially the first, the governments are trying to defend the national myths in their current forms, and are curtailing free speech to do it. (Which is what Ms. Berlinski is opposing, and by referring to a French figure of mythic proportions.)

What makes our own myth remarkable is the way it rests on ideas and laws, more than any race or religion. The complaints that led to independence for certain grew out of the British constitution, and its common-law way of developing rights. Let colonists vote for the assemblies that tax them, as Britons vote for the Parliament that taxes them, and they'll pick up the idea that they have a right to it - not in the civil-law sense that someone formally granted it, but in the common-law way, that the unifying theory is to be discerned from the actual decisions made. And our myth certainly relies on the idea of these things as rights - yet is blessedly detached from any continued racial identity. Our national identity is not weakened if we admit that Anglo-Saxons can commit beastly atrocities - the document that started it all is filled with such accusations. More remarkably, if we admit that the ideas are noble, and the men who made them law were doing noble acts, we can admit much more wihtout weakening the myth at all - that they carried flaws with their nobility, as true heroes always do, and that Americans have done many awful things since by not living up to those ideas.

(The Jewish "national myth" of the Old Testament shows some strong parallels - 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles recast, often with some pretty heavy shading, the history of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms as a matter of "We did well when we kept the commandments and we did very badly when we didn't.")

To the Turkish government, it seems, if you deny that "the Turkish people, as such, are too noble to have committed genocide," you're striking too hard at an idea bound up with their race and religion (for it certainly precedes their current constitution) that they believe holds them together.

P.S. - Yes, I know, I'm oversimplifying by writing as if there's one unchanging successful myth among each people. I oversimplify to be able to write at all.

A Boy, His Dog, and His Sword

2012-01-02T16:00:00.001-05:00

Something else on a lute:

The large number of strings on this lute allows a cascade of notes at a very low tempo and across a wide range, which is an interesting effect. We are more used to hearing it done on fewer strings, and at a higher tempo, in American bluegrass.

Inside the Myth of Europe

2012-01-02T11:30:00.001-05:00

Dr. John Gray echoes Mr. Blair's writings on the dangers of mythology.

[The European Union's founders] were swayed by a myth - a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values. The process might be slow and faltering and at times go into reverse, but eventually the whole of humankind would live under the same enlightened system of government.

When you're inside a myth it looks like fact, and for those who were inside the myth of the end of history it seems to have given a kind of peace of mind. Actually history was on the move again. But since it was clearly moving into difficult territory, it was more comfortable to believe that the past no longer mattered.

Those dangers are real; the difference I have with these gentlemen on the point is that I think the danger means that you have to take control of the process. Myths are indispensable to human consciousness. We are most vulnerable to the baleful effects just when we -- as the modern Europeans -- think we are disposing of myths and living a new, regulated, scientific life.

We last saw Dr. Gray here writing in response to Dr. Stephen Pinker's new book, which argues a very similar myth: that humanity is engaged in moral progress that is bringing us to a state of less violence, the world wars notwithstanding. Here is Timothy Synder at Foreign Affairs rejecting Dr. Pinker (hat tip Arts & Letters Daily):

A principle of the scientific method is to arrange experiments so that one's own prior beliefs can be challenged. Pinker's natural experiment with history generates instead a selective rereading, in which his own commitments become the guiding moral light for past and future. But of course libertarianism, like all other ideologies, involves a normative account of resource distribution: those who have should keep. There is nothing scientific about this, although again, like all other ideologies, libertarianism presents itself simply as a matter of natural reason, or, in Pinker's case, "intelligence." Pinker goes so far as to suggest that libertarianism is equivalent to intelligence, since holding libertarian views correlates with high IQ scores. Since he believes that the need to regularly adjust IQ tests to preserve an average score of 100 means that we are growing more intelligent generation by generation, he deduces that we are becoming more libertarian. Pinker also conflates libertarian ideology with ethics, allowing him to conclude that we are therefore becoming increasingly moral. Each step in this argument is shaky, to say the least. As Pinker might have learned from Kant or Hume or any of the other Enlightenment figures he mentions, one cannot jump from reason to morals in this way. Even if each generation is brighter than the last, as Pinker believes, being smart is not the same thing as being just. To have an account of ethics, one needs to begin from ideas of right and wrong, not simply from mental habits that happen to be widespread in one's own milieu and moment.

My own critique of the whole 'moral progress' argument -- not merely Dr. Pinker's contribution to it -- is along similar lines. We obtain much of our morality from rubbing against other people, who in turn get theirs from rubbing against the people in their circles. Thus it should normally be expected to be the case that groups of people closer to each other, in time or in space, will have moral opinions more similar to each others' than groups of people who are further removed from each other.

It would be striking, then, if we couldn't read history as an arc leading to our own moral values: and that will be true whoever we are, and whatever our moral values happen to be! This is a basic fallacy, an error in logic, that arises from a failure to recognize the fact that human beings learn much of their moral code from each other.

What's much more interesting to me are the counterexamples. One of the things that amazes in reading Chaucer, or Averroes, or Plato, is the degree to which we can find common ground with people centuries removed. This points to a small but crucial moral core that doesn't change, but that is accessible to human reason in every generation. There is no "progress" from this place because it is the destination: the best we can hope for, in any generation, is to reach it and to remain there for the brief space of our life. If we can also guide our children to it, and our friends, we have done all that morality can be asked to do for humankind.

Good reason to carry a gun and a knife

2012-01-02T10:57:00.002-05:00

. . . In case some guy goes into an icy river with three kids in his car, including one still strapped into a car-seat. Chris Willden, a former cop from a family full of cops, military, and EMTs, shot out one of the windows, cut loose the car-seat, and got all three kids out of the car. Two weren't breathing any more, but bystanders got them going again with CPR, and all are now recovering from hypothermia. Way to go, Chris.

Speaking of being the sort of fellow people would like to have around in an emergency, I've just finished "Extreme Fear," written by the guy who inspired my recent post about the inexplicable Air France disaster. It contains the perfect antidote story: an aerobatics expert whose right wing strut buckled during a strenuous stunt. With seconds to live, he remembered a pilot who popped a damaged wing back into place by flying upside down, so he flipped over. Then his engine cut out. Still flying upside down at low altitude, he coolly carried out the checklist for starting the engine back up. Next he considered whether to land upside-down in the water or in some trees, and instead lit on the idea of flipping his plane back over at the last second and landing on solid ground before the wing could buckle again. He walked away.

Definitely not the deer-in-the-headlights sort. Kudos to those who can keep their heads in situations where I'd be thinking about as clearly as the average lizard.

The Old Year Now Away is Fled...

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

A gentle version providing some of the verses:

The old year now away is fled,

The new year it is entered;

Then let us all our sins down tread,

And joyfully all appear.

Let's merry be this holiday,

And let us run with sport and play,

Hang1 sorrow, let's cast care away

God send us a merry new year!

...

And now let all the company

In friendly manner all agree,

For we are here welcome all may see

Unto this jolly good cheer.

I thank the master and his dame,

The which are founders of the same,

To eat, to drink now is no shame:

God send us a happy new year!

But somehow they skipped my favorite lines:

Come lads and lasses every one,

Jack, Tom, Dick, Bess, Mary and Joan,

Let's cut that meat unto the bone,

For welcome you need not fear.

And here for good liquor you shall not lack,

It will whet the brains and strengthen the back;

This jolly good cheer it must go to wrack:

God send us a happy new year!

Come, give's more liquor when I do call,

I'll drink to each one in this hall,

I hope that so loud I must not bawl,

So unto me lend an ear.

Good fortune to all do send,

And to our dame who is my friend,

Lord bless us all, and so I end:

God send us a happy new year!

Amen!

It's early in the morning, and that of a new year: so let's have the Children's Meledy.

Hogmanay

2011-12-31T23:46:00.001-05:00

It's not often that I get the feeling of really missing out, but man...

Here in Atlanta we ring in the New Year with the Peach Drop, but fancy being decked out like a Viking and wielding lit torches to burn your Viking long ship – that is how the folks from Edinburgh in Scotland carry out their Hogmanay celebrations.

Dressed as Vikings in their helmets and warm wrappings, locals carried torches and reenacted traditions for ringing in the New Year to include their Viking past....

Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebrations featured the longest firework display in the history of the event. A total of 5.5 tonnes of fireworks, producing more than 15,000 stars, will be let off during the display over Edinburgh Castle.

Well, maybe next year!

Hooah

2011-12-31T23:32:00.001-05:00

Arts & Letters Daily posts this:

Liu Xiaobo is charged by the Chinese government with the “crime of incitement to subvert state power.” He has the honor of being guilty...

Now that's rightly said.

The Biased Law

2011-12-31T20:36:00.002-05:00

Probably several of you saw the recent dustup over the question of whether marriage law has become so unfair to men that it is unconscionable to recommend marriage to a young man today. There were a number of responses to that, including this one from Catholic Bandita, a woman who has come out on the other side of the ledger. I am indebted to the lady for this picture, below, which says something I truly believe is right.

Smitty at the Other McCain suggests a return to first principles, and a re-examination of what the institution was for in the first place. We have just completed such an examination here, in our autumn debate on polygamy, so it is not necessary to do it again; if you want to revisit the discussion, though, Elise has kindly gathered all of my posts and her own into a category.

I do want to say something about the bias in the law, though, because I find this particular bias to be an interesting one. I think it represents a real challenge to our idea that equality before the law is a goal towards which we should strive: this seems to me to be a clear case in which equality before the law would be wrong.

First, though, we need to narrow the field a bit. There are so many different ways in which men and women are treated differently by the law in family matters that it would be wise to choose a couple of clear-cut cases, with minimal ambiguity, so that we don't end up lost in anecdotes. I can think of two examples that are paradigms of unequal treatment by the law, and that illuminate the problem well.

The first is the law of termination of parental responsibility. The woman has a legal right to abortion in this country that is essentially unfettered; she may thus terminate her duties at will, and for any reason, up until the moment of birth (and even afterwards, in the case of partial-birth abortion). The man has no right to demand the termination of the baby; whereas the patria in ancient Rome made the call on exposure and infanticide, in America it is the mother.

There remains some disparity after birth. In cases in which the child is born, in 49 states and Puerto Rico, it is lawful to abandon the child for adoption at a recognized safe haven. However, in four of those states only the mother can do it.

That is the first matter. The second -- a law currently under discussion, rather than actualized, but a good and illuminating example -- is this proposal to restrict mens' right to stop living with a woman they have gotten pregnant if he is doing so to try to compel her to have an abortion.

HB 5882 [CAPA] actually makes it a crime for a man to "change or attempt to change an existing housing or cohabitation arrangement" with a pregnant significant other, to "file or attempt to file for a divorce" from his pregnant wife, or to "withdraw or attempt to withdraw financial support" from a woman who he has been supporting, if it is determined that the man is doing these things to try to pressure the woman to terminate her pregnancy.

What would we get out of equality before the law in the first case? Something rather worse than what we have now: a situation in which fathers were either empowered to demand the death of a child they didn't want (as mothers already are); or, failing that, the right to abandon responsibility for a child that they sired, leaving the woman financially alone to raise it. One thing seemed to agree on with Aquinas' philosophy of matrimony, which we encountered in our discussion of marriage and polygamy, is that the principal end of marriage is procreation -- not merely in the sense of having a child, but seeing that the child is raised to achieve its capacity to fulfill a role as a member of, and defender of, our civilization. Equality before this law would only further damage that principal end.

The first case is a case in which equality before the law is wrong because the law itself is wrong. Asking for an equal right to perform an injustice is to ask for more injustice. That is against reason.

It might be possible to ask for equality in the other direction without violating reason -- i.e., by limiting access to abortion. However, at least so far the Supreme Court has refused to entertain almost any such limits. Unless the Court changes its mind, or we change the Constitution, we do not have that option. We have only the option of asking for more injustice, or accepting inequality before the law. Of these options, inequality before the law is the wiser, and the morally better, choice.

What do we get out of equality before the law in the second case? Should we accept a situation in which a man is free to try to force a woman to kill her child by starvation or poverty? It's the same problem we had in the first case. Of course it should not be legal to abandon your child or its mother. Since our country has abandoned the requirement of marriage, naturally this is going to intrude upon those who go about siring children without bothering to marry.

Yet can we ask for equality in the other direction here? Can we morally state that a woman is not free to leave a man who has gotten her pregnant? Of course not: especially if he is furious about the business of the child. It may put her in terrible danger, and the baby as well. Her freedom to leave is necessary.

Thus we have a situation in this case in which inequality before the law is actually necessary for justice. If justice is -- as Aristotle put it -- to treat relevantly similar cases similarly, the sex divide presents us with a very relevant difference. Inequality before the law is thus necessary for a just result.

But let us return to the image above. True justice between men and women lies not the in the law, but in chivalry: in that willful, loving sacrifice of self for the beloved other. This, at least, is a symmetrical relationship: both the man and the woman must be ready to give of themselves for the other for it to flourish. When it does, however, it is the glory of the world, and the joy of life.

So, is it right to speak of marriage to the young man? Surely so, if the boy has the guts for the big game: for a love that speaks to thunder, and answers the principal end. And if he doesn't, well, what's the point of living at all? A man dies soon enough. Why wrap anyone else up in it, if you don't have what it takes to play for the real thing?

The City of Legions

2011-12-31T20:02:00.001-05:00

Once Rome built a fortress in the west of Britain. It was called Deva Victrix, goddess of victory, and indeed there remains today a shrine to Minerva there. It was the sometime home of Legio XX, and is located in what is modern day Chester, England.

Some believe that this was the "City of Legions" where Arthur fought his ninth battle, although Caerleon in Wales is a competitor for that honor. Caerleon also has a significant Roman fortress. The University of Wales at Newport has built a working 3-D model of the Roman works, which you can explore to get an idea of the scale of the fortifications.

The map is pretty neat, even if one can easily think of significant improvements that could be made -- it would be nice to have some sort of hypertext tagged to the building objects, for example, that would lead to explanations of just what they were and what historical or archaeological sources are at work in our understanding. A bibliography or a list of recent research into the works would be welcome as well.

Still, even at this early stage, it's pretty nifty stuff. They're apparently putting one together for the Newport Ship, as well. That one -- a 3-D model of a fifteenth-century sailing vessel -- should be fun to play with.

Bring the UK into NAFTA?

2011-12-29T11:50:00.002-05:00

It's not a bad idea, really. Alliances should be based not merely on economic interest, but ideally on a shared vision. If you're going to help make someone rich, why not someone who supports the same basic values that you do?

It would make a certain amount of sense to turn the Anglosphere into an economic free trade zone as well as a military alliance.

La Rotta di Tristano

2011-12-28T22:35:00.002-05:00

"Tristano" here is Tristan, the knight who loved Isolde. This harper has some talent, sadly obscured once the solo ends. I wouldn't mind hearing the whole piece on the harp only.

Here is a more traditional reading of the same tune. If you become impatient with it, skip to about 4:30, and you'll find it comes alive when they introduce a pipe.

If Tomorrow Comes

2011-12-28T11:45:00.002-05:00

Read this, and let's discuss it.

The Language of Birds

2011-12-28T11:12:00.001-05:00

Some backstory on Wren Day, from Peter Berresford Ellis' The Druids (p. 223 in the 1994 edition):

From native Celtic sources comes confirmation that bird augury was widely used. An Irish version of the Historia Brittonum, by the Welsh historian Nennius, includes an ancient poem which refers to six Druids who lived at Breagh-magh and who practised 'the watching of birds.' ... The name of the wren was given in Cormac's Glossary as drui-en -- the bird of the Druids. Certainly an Irish name for the wren was drean, and a Life of St Moling confirms the etymology of the Glossary. The wren has come down to us as a bird of some significance and on St Stephen's Day (26 December) in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, and even in parts of Essex and Devon, it was hunted and killed by local boys before being carried in procession[.]

This is a subject that has been of interest to me for a long time. In the old Norse poem Rígsþula, a mortal grandson of Heimdall learns the tongue:

43. Soon grew up | the sons of Jarl,
Beasts they tamed, | and bucklers rounded,
Shafts they fashioned, | and spears they shook.
44. But Kon the Young | learned runes to use,
Runes everlasting, | the runes of life;
Soon could he well | the warriors shield,
Dull the swordblade, | and still the seas.
45. Bird-chatter learned he, | flames could he lessen.,
Minds could quiet, | and sorrows calm;
. . . . . . . . . .
The might and strength | of twice four men.
46. With Rig-Jarl soon | the runes he shared,
More crafty he was, | and greater his wisdom;
The right he sought, | and soon he won it,
Rig to be called, | and runes to know.
47. Young Kon rode forth | through forest and grove,
Shafts let loose, | and birds he lured;
There spake a crow | on a bough that sat:
"Why lurest thou, Kon, | the birds to come?
48. " 'Twere better forth | on thy steed to fare,
. . . . . | and the host to slay.
49. "The halls of Dan | and Danp are noble,
Greater their wealth | than thou bast gained;
Good are they | at guiding the keel,
Trying of weapons, | and giving of wounds.

Hilda Ellis Davidson describes several more examples of Celtic and Norse mythic figures for whom learning to speak the language of birds is a part of the initiation into wisdom that allows for heroic success. (Pages 86-7.)

Understanding the speech of birds could give a hero entry into the world of ravens and valkyries, where defeat and victory were ordained, or in more everyday terms it could mean an ability to interpret calls and movements of birds and thereby receive warning of future events. Such aspects of bird lore are referred to in the Edda poems and in the ninth century Hrafnsmal [i.e., "The Tale of the Raven" -- Grim] the stanzas form a dialogue between a raven and a valkyrie. She is said to account herself wise because she understood the language of birds, and is herself described as 'the white-throated one with bright eyes,' which suggests that she herself was in bird form. Goddesses, as well as Odin himself, travel in the form of birds, and the same is true of the battle-goddesses of Ireland. One bears the name of Badb (Crow), while the Morrigan, an ominous figure who encounters Cu Chulainn in various shapes, is called Battle Crow (an badb catha). Cu Chulainn once sees her as a crow on a bramble bush and takes this as an ill omen: 'A dangerous enchanted woman you are!'...

A note in a Middle Irish manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin, lists the various cries of the raven which indicate that visitors are approaching, and attention is paid to the number of calls, the position of the bird, and the direction from which the calls come. Young warriors must have been trained in such skills... Two birds on a tree warn Sigurd against the wicked smith[.]

Thus it appears there are two levels of skill being described here. One is what you might call a 'Louis L'amour' skill, because it is the kind of awareness of nature that he often uses to endow his own heroes with special success in battle. This level is the skill of understanding the birds well enough to know what it means that they call when they do, and how they do; to know that noisy birds fall silent when something fearful or strange approaches, say, or that a flock of birds starting from a ridgeline may mean that there is a predator or a man approaching from that quarter. This is the kind of knowledge the Middle Irish note contains. This aspect represents a skill that probably was ordinarily taught to the sons of the fighting classes, as Davidson notes, and it's a skill that you can teach to your own sons if you take the trouble to learn it.

The other level is a genuinely mystical ability to speak with the birds and engage their reason in conversation. This is assumed to be a capacity available to gods and valkyrie (who very likely were goddesses themselves in the proto-myth, as the Morrigan is in the Irish myth). I find this aspect to be interesting chiefly because it assumes that the order of reason extends to crows and ravens, and wrens, at least.

That aligns with my own investigations into philosophy; if it fact it proves to be true, it ought to expand our view of how broadly consciousness is spread within the universe. We share a lot of genetic similarities with birds, but they are quite significantly different from us as well. In order for there to be a common language, even in theory, we would have to be able to work out the rules of each others' games: and success at that means that we participate in the same order of reason, even if we have different levels of access to it. We can teach birds to play some of our games, as for example in training a parrot to speak. How much does it understand? I don't know, but my father tells the story of a parrot who lived with an old woman he once went to visit. It watched him for a while, and then said: "Goodbye!" After a moment, it said again, "Goodbye!" A third time it said, "Goodbye!" After a moment more, it turned to the old woman and said, "He won't go."

Pretty Good, Dr. Gingrich

2011-12-26T21:12:00.000-05:00

As I Was Going to Kill And All

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

...I met a wren upon a wall:

...In the tree, the holly tree, where all the boys do follow me...

Happy Wren Day!

Not very Christmasy

2011-12-25T06:39:00.002-05:00

But I couldn't resist posting this picture of this cloud-monster reaching over the horizon to grab us.

Merry Christmas from the Hall

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

The Hall Skull Bedecked for the Yuletide

A Song of Joy

A Song of Feasting

A Song of Wassailing

A Song of Making Merry

The Evisceration of the Uighurs

2011-12-24T11:36:00.001-05:00

The thing that bothers me more than anything else, these last few years, is the question of how to respond to matters like these.

A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract.

That is only to set the stage. We understand about harvesting organs from executed prisoners, yes, but what about people who were never prisoners -- who were summarily executed by China's armed police?

[T]he armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.
“This one. It’s this one.”
Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair.
“That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”
“Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”

Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.”

“Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!”... As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again.... Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly.

What about the ones who were butchered alive?

[I]t took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia....

Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.

What about ethnic cleansing via the murder of babies?

If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.

What bothers me isn't the existence of evil: the structure of the world is not our fault. What bothers me is the lack of a way to respond to it without creating a worse evil: economic sanctions could collapse China, leading to millions of innocent deaths and civil war; smiting the wicked with the sword would lead to an international war. This is what bothers me about the world.

Christmas Oratorio

2011-12-24T00:24:00.000-05:00

This one is by Bach. I assume you need no introduction. The man was a miracle.

A True Victory

2011-12-23T20:37:00.000-05:00

The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action normally trumpets their successes on law-making matters; given the general turn against anti-gun legislation, these are less crucial than they were twenty years ago. However, this report is not about legislation, but about an even more substantial victory:

Data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2008, the number and per capita rate of firearm accident deaths fell to an all-time low. There were 592 firearm accident deaths (0.19 such accidents per 100,000 population) in 2008, as compared to 613 accidents (.20 per 100,000) in 2007. In 2008, the chance of a child dying in a firearm accident was roughly one in a million.

Firearm accidents accounted for 0.5% of all accidental deaths; well below the percentages accounted for by motor vehicle accidents, falls, fires, poisonings, and several other more common types of mishaps.

I say this is more substantial because it relies upon moving a far greater number of people. To achieve a victory in Congress, as difficult as that can be, requires affecting the behavior of fewer than 300 people -- often far fewer, since bad bills can often be killed in committee.

To bring the rate of accidental gun deaths down to so low a level requires influencing the behavior of millions. This required a commitment to gun safety in perhaps a hundred million households nationwide; it required discipline and education on the part of all those families. Nevertheless, quietly, it was achieved.

Canceling the Mass in Christmas

2011-12-23T18:30:00.003-05:00

The sorting out of Iraq's internal tensions was inevitable given our rapid departure; but the threats against Christians are not new.

Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk in northern Iraq told the agency Aid to the Church in Need that Christians will spend Christmas in "great fear" because of the risk of new attacks.

All services and Masses have been scheduled for daylight hours, he said in an interview with Rome-based AsiaNews.

"Midnight Christmas Mass has been canceled in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk as a consequence of the never-ending assassinations of Christians," he said, citing the Oct. 31, 2010, attack on the Syrian Catholic cathedral that left 57 people dead in the Iraqi capital.

Something to think about, this Christmastide.

Christmas Overture

2011-12-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

It's a German piece, given what "German" meant in 1700.

Yuletide: Scottish Shortbread

2011-12-22T09:15:00.005-05:00

The following bit of history is from The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook. The book is an outstanding example of what a cookbook should be, and by far the finest one I've ever seen when it comes to any sort of bread. I think they're more experts on baking than history, but so far everything else they've written about bread has proven to be right. So why not 'history of bread'?

Scottish shortbread was originally made from oatmeal and was served on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The edges of the round "cake" were notched, symbolizing the sun which was being entreated to return. Nowadays in Scotland, shortbread is mostly made with wheat flour but the edges are still marked with those symbolic notches. It is served on Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) and New Year's morning to "first-footers," those revelers who have stayed up all night to see the New Year and are the first to go from house to house, visiting and celebrating.

Here at Grim's Hall, the old fashion is always the order of the day. So, I modified the recipe to be made chiefly with oats, and am serving it on the Solstice. This Hogmanay thing sounds like it could be fun too, though, especially since it seems to involve building and burning Viking longships. Maybe some year we'll be able to swing the trip to Edinburgh for the celebration.

Stuff the Net Is Good at

2011-12-21T11:16:00.002-05:00

Here's something interactive websites are really useful for: walking us through concepts in geometry. If you're trying to home school a kid, this sure would be a helpful tool. There are clear and well-organized explanations, too, better than the gibberish we often encounter in printed textbooks. I linked to the parabola page, but the site is broad.

Cherry-Picked Climate Emails Explained

2011-12-20T11:12:00.003-05:00

We can all relax; ClimateGate2 was completely overblown. The University of East Anglia has posted explanations of some of the troubling quotations taken unfairly out of context, such as: "I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show the warming," “Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital," and "Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden."

Yeah, I still don't get it, either.

North Korea Goes Dark in Mourning

2011-12-20T08:43:00.003-05:00

Wait, that's not mourning, that's just Kim Jong Il's legacy. Meanwhile, the Cuban government declared three days of mourning, presumably because he made them look good. (On the same principle, Nicaragua and Venezuela expressed sincere condolences.) I suppose he gets points, too, for reducing North Korea's carbon footprint, reducing light pollution for stargazers, and all but eliminating income inequality in his country in the only way we know from experience to be possible.

I keep looking at that satellite photograph. What would that area of the world have looked like if the U.S. hadn't gotten into the Korean War? On the other hand, why weren't China and North Viet Nam dumb enough to achieve the same fate? They certainly tried hard enough.

The Washington Post (h/t Maggie's Farm) explains it in a succinct chart:

Orientis Partibus

2011-12-19T13:42:00.000-05:00

This version is from Hungary. The song is in Latin, so that pilgrims from anywhere might have understood it if they had learned enough of the language to appreciate the Mass.

Most of these old Latin songs are called by their first few words. "Orientis Partibus" means, "Out of the east came..." Well, what came? This version from Italy gives you a good idea:

We are a little early for the Feast of the Ass, but this will give you time to plan.

[The 14th of January] is a particularly bittersweet feastday with a vivid, raucous history of celebration worthy of the medieval epoch. It is that of the Flight in Egypt, also known as Festum Asinorum, the Feast of the Ass....

This event, amongst others, was celebrated in the Middle Ages as a play, inspired by the pseudo-Augustinian "Sermo contra judaeos, paganos, et Arianos de Symbolo," (a sermon which I burn to read, being an adjuration both to Jews and Gentiles--historial, philosophical, and prophetic). At the climax of the lively procession, the ass exchanged the wizard Balaam, who was marching to curse God's chosen people, for the virgin Mother of God, who was flying into Egypt to save her Son. All fittingly culminated in the Mass, at the end of which the officiating priest did not say 'Ite Missa est' nor did the congregation respond 'Deo gratias.' Instead there was a startling exchange of: 'Heehaw, heehaw, heehaw!'

You can read more about the Feast -- which was chiefly a French festival, though we have seen the appeal of the Latin song far afield -- in this article.

2011-12-18T19:14:00.001-05:00

Saw these ladies on Friday night last in Philadelphia. If you ever get the chance to hear them live, please do.

2011-12-18T18:59:00.000-05:00

Heh.

Songs from All Saints

2011-12-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

The notes say that All Saints' choir was a children's choir until 1968, at which point the school that fed the choir closed, and the choir became one of adult sopranos.

Fish Fraud

2011-12-18T10:23:00.004-05:00

Restaurant-goers no doubt will be shocked to learn that fish are sometimes mislabeled on menus. According to an expose in the Boston Globe,

The rampant mislabeling of fish that consumers buy can be largely traced to this: the lack of anything like the regulations imposed on meat suppliers.

OK, call me a bomb-throwing anarchist, but I'd probably trace the problem to several other factors before I called in the regulators. First, fish are known by a bewildering variety of names, so it's hardly fraud to call escolar "white tuna" if that's a common euphemism. Second, the average patron would scream and run out of the room if the fish showed up on his plate still looking like a fish. Eek! Eyes! Fins! So most of us are used to seeing our fish show up filleted and anonymous, barely identifiable as fish any more, let alone a specific species. Whose fault is that? Third, not that many palettes can distinguish one roughly similar fish from another by taste and texture. My husband can; I can't. I may need an educated palette more than I need a regulator.

So this isn't a problem I'm eager to see Congress solve. I'll all for rating agencies of the Michelin variety who are willing to award stars to restaurants who practice truth in fish, but I'm really not interested in seeing federal regulators show up to harass my local restaurateurs. If the fish isn't carrying dangerous pathogens and I can't tell the difference by eating it, then I feel I ought to be left to the task of frequenting the restaurants that do the best job of winning my confidence regarding the source of their food.

One for Eric Blair

2011-12-17T20:45:00.002-05:00

Apparently the tomb of Scipio Africanus, and others of his lineage, is now open to visitors for the first time in two decades.

For those of you not familiar with the general who defeated Hannibal, here is his biography. He was noted not only for his military excellence, but for his attention to virtue.

This painting of him celebrates his reunion of a captured maiden and her fiance, when under the prevailing law he had every right to take her as a war prize. Not only that, he gave back the ransom her parents had sent to buy her liberty.

Driving is a Grandfathered Liberty

2011-12-17T10:44:00.000-05:00

Frank J. is a comedy writer, but I think he's really on to something here.

Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there....

“So you’re proposing that people speed around in tons of metal? You must mean only really smart, well-trained people?”

“No. Everyone. Even stupid people."

“Won’t millions be killed?”

“Oh, no. Not that many. Just a little more than 40,000 a year.”

“And injuries?”

“Oh . . . millions.”

There’s no way that would get approved today.

Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety.

The next question is, how long will this grandfathered freedom last?

Ignorance is Bliss

2011-12-17T10:41:00.002-05:00

Wired talks about a study that appears to demonstrate that ignorance is good for democracy.

Not surprisingly, when the majority of animals had a strong preference to move to one location, the group moved there. Even when the majority’s preference was equal in strength to the minority’s preference, the majority won out. However, when the strength of the minority’s preference was increased past a certain threshold, the minority could dictate the group’s behavior. These results suggest that an opinionated minority can win out over a majority with weaker convictions.

Things got more interesting when the researchers added animals without a preference to the model. Under these conditions, even when the minority’s preference was extremely strong, the presence of the “uninformed” individuals actually returned control to the majority. The more uninformed individuals there were, the stronger this effect became (up to a point; eventually noise took over).

The researchers then used an experimental approach to ask the same questions using golden shiners, a very social species of fish known for their schooling behavior. Some fish were trained to swim to a yellow target in the tank, and some were trained to move toward a blue target. Intrinsically, the fish preferred the yellow target—even after training, their preference for the yellow target was stronger than their preference for the blue target. This created an natural way to test the researchers’ theories.

The results from these lab tests mirrored the findings of the computational model. When the minority of fish in the tank were those trained to go to the yellow target (meaning they had a strong preference for the option), they won out and the group went there. When untrained fish were introduced into the tank, however, the majority regained control, even though their preference for the blue target was weaker.

In this country, we seem to move toward whatever a vocal minority wants, unless there is an opposing vocal minority: then, it has been my observation, the minority usually wins that has the worse idea. Perhaps we need more ignorance to straighten things out, although I'm also increasingly thinking that we just need less social tolerance for vocal minorities.

Rabbit in the Headlights

2011-12-16T17:55:00.002-05:00

Author Jeff Wise specializes in the human response to fear. His book "Extreme Fear" examines how many people have coped with paralyzing danger, from wild animal attacks to forest fires to aircraft emergencies. He notes that exercise helps the brain cope with anxiety; nervous parachuters on their way to a drop perform better on mental puzzles like crosswords in proportion to their physical fitness. Another trick is either to be in control, or at least to visualize oneself in control. (I learned decades ago that imagining myself behind the throttle in a commercial aircraft cut way down on the fear of flying that used to afflict me from time to time.) Staying warm is surprisingly effective, too. Scuba divers without wetsuits tend to have more panic-related mishaps.

In a recent article for Popular Mechanics, Wise tries to unravel how an Air France co-pilot over the tropical Atlantic in 2009 could have responded so disastrously to anxiety-provoking severe weather and a relatively minor icing-up incident by putting his aircraft into a completely unnecessary and deadly stall. Part of the explanation may be that most of us lose our higher brain functions under the influence of extreme fear and must fall back on rote training. Repetitive training under high stress can be a life-saver, but the Air France pilot, unfortunately, fell back on a singularly inappropriate routine.

These recommendations are nothing very startling or new, except for one: studies show that having sex cuts down measurably on the fear of public speaking. Now they tell me.

I'm not sure if the movie "Three Kings" is one I'd recommend to this audience without reservations, but one line did stick with me. George Clooney counsels a terrified young recruit by explaining: "Here's how it works. You do the thing you're scared ****less of, and you get the courage afterwards, not before."

A Climate Skepticism Denialist

2011-12-16T10:09:00.004-05:00

Skepticism about skepticism: this is very meta. I followed a link from my favorite science compilation page, Not Exactly Rocket Science, to this article from a British blogger agonizing over recent polling data suggesting that the global warming narrative is losing steam in Great Britain. The number of her countrymen who believe claims about environmental threats are exaggerated is 37%, a sharp increase from the 24% with similar beliefs a decade ago. But she's quick to point out that data can be misleading, especially in the hands of media with an interest in presenting a narrative:

The survey also considered whether people agreed more with these two statements: “We worry too much about the future of the environment and not enough about prices and jobs today” and “People worry too much about human progress harming the environment”* (p95). From this, the BSA report argues that the public are more sceptical that a threat exists. I’m not sure that follows. Maybe, but it’s a jump to cite scepticism. It could just be that people think we worry too much. Perhaps they just think there are other things to worry about. As the report itself suggests, the “financial pinch” of the recession may well be having an impact on the ways people make choices about the environment. Or, perhaps people agree that climate change is happening, just that there is nothing we can do. Again, this doesn’t mean climate sceptics aren’t winning the communications battle here, I just mean I don’t necessarily see that from the data. It all rather depends on how we unpack and then define denialism/ climate scepticism, and I don’t think the report does that very clearly (not that it necessarily should, but we need to keep that lack of definition in mind when reading the data).

The blogger also notes that, in evaluating sweeping claims, it's important to examine the source of the underlying data:

One final thing that bugged me about this report was that it didn’t really examine how and where people got their information about the environment from, and yet still felt able to make loose connections between the timing of Climategate and the apparent rise in scepticism. From the final pages: “we conclude that media coverage may make a difference – not least ‘new’ media and the internet ‘blogosphere’ where unfounded opinion can sometimes be favoured over scientific fact” (p106). The impact of the media on people’s understanding, reasoning and framing of any issue, perhaps in particular ones including esoteric expertise like climate science, is incredibly complex, and the BSA report writers should have known better. They should certainly know better than to make loose comments about unfounded opinion on blogosphere (which is a large, diverse and porous area of activity). I also don’t see how they can look at a change over ten years and say it has to be something that happened in 2009, no matter how much media ink was spilled. To their credit they do also say it could also be matter of fatigue and refer to financial cost, etc.

Don't you hate it when people are secretive about their data sources? She concludes with this poignant plea:

Personally, I’d like to see them acknowledge that they don’t know and call for investment in more research here.

The only thing missing was a demand for sounder science before society was expected to invest trillions of dollars and wreck the world economy to address a potentially non-existent threat. I do admire the blogger's choice of art, though:

RIP Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T08:11:00.002-05:00

When the embassies of Denmark were burning around the globe, Christopher Hitchens organized the only protest I ever wanted to attend: a manifestation in support of the Mark. I went, and he was there giving speeches and talking to the press about "solidarity." The concept was one from his Trotsyite youth; by then he applied it to the defense of Western civilization instead.

His last piece was on Nietzsche, informed by his own intense suffering from the radiation cure that failed to save him.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Nietzsche was destined to find this out in the hardest possible way, which makes it additionally perplexing that he chose to include the maxim in his 1889 anthology Twilight of the Idols. (In German this is rendered as Götzen-Dämmerung, which contains a clear echo of Wagner’s epic. Possibly his great quarrel with the composer, in which he recoiled with horror from Wagner’s repudiation of the classics in favor of German blood myths and legends, was one of the things that did lend Nietzsche moral strength and fortitude. Certainly the book’s subtitle—“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”—has plenty of bravado.)

In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger.

In what follows he examined the intensity of his own suffering with a clear eye. It is a powerful piece, and it underlies why this morning finds us reading tributes to him from people who disagreed with him sharply. And that category includes almost everyone. Catholics were outraged by his attacks on Mother Theresa. Feminists hated his writings on women. Capitalists grind their teeth at his kind words for Trotsky; Leftists, at his support of the Iraq war.

Wherever he planted his flag, he defended it fearlessly: and in the vigor of his defense, even his enemies of the hour gained insight, and sharpened their steel. We are told we ought to love our enemies; this is the sort it is easy to love. Thus, not in spite but indeed because of his outrages, he has no want of men to mourn for him.

A Telephone Town Hall?

2011-12-15T20:10:00.003-05:00

Apparently my congressman decided to call his entire district tonight to invite us to have a 'town hall' meeting by phone. That's about a hundred and fifty thousand people; I had no idea that you could run a teleconference with that many participants.

I write my congressman from time to time (in fact, I'd just written him today), but I had never spoken to him before. Listening to his comments, I learned several things about him.

1) He apparently does not believe that the 14th Amendment includes birthright citizenship, which he would like to end. I was under the impression that it does, but having looked into the controversy, it sounds like there may be an argument to be made here -- the question arises based on whether one is fully subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government or not. Children of ambassadors of foreign nations born in the United States, for example, are not granted citizenship.

I'm not sure that window is wide enough to admit of denying birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, although I can see how one would structure an argument from it: 'If their parents had subjected themselves to our jurisdiction, they would not have been present to have the child on our soil. Thus...' etc.

2) He believes that the government is going "to destroy this country" if people do not begin demanding Constitutionally limited government.

3) He has confidence in the House, but thinks the Senate is broken. His contention is that the House has sent forward 28 bipartisan bills that would improve the jobs picture, but that Harry Reid in the Senate won't let them make the floor.

4) He was very quick to make sure that elderly citizens on the call understood that Social Security was secure. If they were afraid of cuts, he would ensure they understood that there was absolutely no proposal to cut 'a single penny' from their check.

5) However, when another citizen raised the possibility that there would not actually be elections in the fall -- due to some sort of Obama-led coup -- he did not offer the same level of reassurance. Whether that is pure politics, or because he has concerns about a coup, I could not say.

Still, I would have thought the danger of a coup was far more remote than the danger of cuts to Social Security. The question about Social Security (and Medicare and Medicaid and Federal Pensions) is not if they will be cut, but how much, and when, and which of the programs will suffer most. The danger of a coup is surely fantastic at this point: no left-leaning coup could be effected in the face of a military that would not support it, and an armed citizenry that would not support it.

6) He believes that regulations and taxes on business are the reason our economy is not recovering. In seeking advice on how to vote on the economy, he has chiefly sought such advice from small businessmen and factory owners. However, he also cited a conversation with Laffer, of the Laffer curve, whom he said had approved of his own bill on the subject of the economy (which bill will never, however, apparently pass the Harry-Reid-controlled-Senate; I think he had more to say about Sen. Reid than anyone else).

7) Not surprising given the district, but he is an outspoken Evangelical Christian. He did think to say something nice about Hanukkah at the end of the call, though; and he had earlier said that he was against all foreign aid except to Israel. ('We're borrowing money to give it away,' being the reason for opposing all foreign aid; but apparently Israel is worth it.)

All in all, an interesting experience -- and apparently he will be doing more such calls in the future.

There's Something Odd About this Test

2011-12-15T17:25:00.000-05:00

Harvard's Project Implicit has an interesting set of tests online, which are meant to show you where your implicit biases may be. You may be strongly or moderately biased toward light skinned people, for example -- if their tests are accurate, 56% of people are.

However, there's something strange about the methodology that I can't quite place. It's based on how fast you can process words and images. I took the religion test, and it tells me that my biases work out this way:

Strongest positive bias: Islam

Moderate positive bias: Christianity/Judiasm (tie)

Less positive bias: Hinduism

Now, while I make no bones about having some biases in this department, I'm pretty sure that isn't an accurate picture of how my biases actually shake out. I can understand how this method would lead to a bad result on Hinduism: of course there will be a processing delay there, because Hindu concepts aren't something my brain uses often. I have to take the instant to remember what "karma" is before I can sort the word, and the concept is packed back in the back of the brain.

The other religions have concepts I use regularly, so naturally they would come out on top. If you were to ask me, though, I would think I had the strongest bias toward Christianity. That suggests there is something odd about the method of determining biases; otherwise, I'd have to accept the existence of an unconscious bias in favor of Islam over my own faith. I think I do have a stronger pro-Islam bias than many Americans, having known some very brave Muslims that I liked and admired, but still, that seems unlikely.

A Failure of Education

2011-12-15T08:48:00.002-05:00

"Faith in humanity," yes. However, there is a little matter of physics.

It takes a train more than a mile to stop once it begins to apply the brakes. Even if the engineer has very good eyes, then, he may just kill your 4-year-old child simply because the train won't stop in time to do otherwise.

Well, 4-year-olds are nimble. Not like you tied her to the track, I hope?