Bthun's Collection:

As promised in the comments below, here are some photos of a portion of bthun's collection.





He writes:

Howdy Grim,

I managed to dig up a few of my favorite all purpose blade. At least the ones I use most often.

I also found the Japanese bayonet. A type 30, straight quillon, with the Mukden Arsenal ( Manchuria ) marking.

The ceremonial sword is not that nice, nor has it ever taken an edge. I have no idea from whence in came. Only that it was in mom and dads, house and I found it while sorting out their estate. Unfortunately the two Arisaka Rifles, a type 38 and a type 99 that dad brought home and gave to me were sold by one of my brothers while I was in the Navy. Whatcha gonna do?

I’m still looking for my oldest knife, the barlow. I packed it away to keep it intact and now I can’t seem to remember where I put it. As they say, of all the things I miss, the thing I miss the most is my mind…

Anyway, in spite of the coughing and an old camera, I managed to capture a few of my blades. And in the spirit of iddy biddy caliber stuff, I pulled out my little Buckmark Pro Target plinker.

Thank you for sharing it with us. I'll be happy to post other reader's favorite blades if they'd like to email me photos and commentary.

Hee Haw

Infidelity:

In honor of the ongoing debate at Cassandra's house, a medley:



Hang out to the end for some Johnny Cash.

UPDATE: Here's Johnny Cash and June Carter doing the same number.



It's funny to see these two singers, both of them highly talented, hamming it up like this. Hee Haw was fun because it was about mocking the biased image of what Southerners were like. Everyone knew that Johnny Cash was a poet and a masterful performer. Part of the fun was seeing him act like a stereotype, showing how ridiculous the stereotype really was.

UPDATE: OK, two more:



That one reminds me of a non-Hee Haw piece, by the "Mouth of the South" himself.

No John Donovan

Shooting Off Your Back Porch:

Well, I'm no John Donovan: the man has a much finer collection than I've imagined, and much more experience employing it. Still, it looks like he was having fun, and I admire a man who knows how to have a good time.

I did do a bit of such shooting today, albeit with a much less impressive weapon. Shooting off the back deck is a good way to enjoy the autumn air even when you have the kind of downpour we had all day today. Here's my target:

Be Ready

Be Ready:

Mickey Kaus has a good thought.

If there are well over a million students in charter schools now, and the federal government is pushing them to grow like Topsy, at what point does a vicious circle set in, with public schools losing their even moderately motivated students, causing them to decline even further, causing even more students to leave, etc.? Not that this public school death spiral would be such a bad thing. We should just be prepared for it. The way we should have been prepared for GM.

We should be preparing for the collapse of our public institutions, not just the schools, because they are indeed on an unsustainable course quite parallel to GM's. We already can't afford the Federal Pensions, Medicare, and Social Security promises made; and yet we've got this wonderful idea to add some sort of universal health-care, funded by yet-more taxes and regulations.

The truth is that 'if a man shall not work, neither shall he eat' -- not because he should not eat, or because we don't want him to eat, but because somebody has to pay his freight. If it's not him, it might be his children; or it might be his wife; or it might be someone he helped out when he was younger. It won't be "society," though, because they won't love him enough to make serious sacrifices for him, forever.

Population booms can allow a society to mask that for a while, as the Baby Boomer period allowed us to mask it here, by dividing the extra freight among enough people that the sacrifices aren't so heavy. Yet they were serious, even when they were so divided.

The Social Security system remained essentially unchanged from its enactment until 1956. However, beginning in 1956 Social Security began an almost steady evolution as more and more benefits were added, beginning with the addition of Disability Insurance benefits. In 1958, benefits were extended to dependents of disabled workers. In 1967, disability benefits were extended to widows and widowers. The 1972 amendments provided for automatic cost-of-living benefits.

In 1965, Congress enacted the Medicare program, providing for the medical needs of persons aged 65 or older, regardless of income. The 1965 Social Security Amendments also created the Medicaid programs, which provides medical assistance for persons with low incomes and resources.

Of course, the expansions of Social Security and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid required additional tax revenues, and thus the basic payroll tax was repeatedly increased over the years. Between 1949 and 1962 the payroll tax rate climbed steadily from its initial rate of 2 percent to 6 percent. The expansions in 1965 led to further rate increases, with the combined payroll tax rate climbing to 12.3 percent in 1980. Thus, in 31 years the maximum Social Security tax burden rose from a mere $60 in 1949 to $3,175 in 1980.

Despite the increased payroll tax burden, the benefit expansions Congress enacted in previous years led the Social Security program to an acute funding crises in the early 1980s. Eventually, Congress legislated some minor programmatic changes in Social Security benefits, along with an increase in the payroll tax rate to 15.3 percent by 1990. Between 1980 and 1990, the maximum Social Security payroll tax burden more than doubled to $7,849.

Due to the economic crisis of the moment, we've almost reached the point at which the illusion cannot be maintained. It will not be long before there is no way to pretend anymore. Your family may take care of you, but your government will not: though they may perhaps beggar your family so much that they can't take care of you either.

Poker

Poker and the President:

Apparently President Obama and I have one thing in common: he plays poker. I have to admit that I find the fact surprising, as he doesn't seem the type to enjoy it. What are the high-stakes gambles of his presidency so far? The places where he went 'all in' on a hand that he knew was likely to win, but couldn't be 100% certain of winning?

Then again, the reason he played poker was apparently not for the fun of it, but for the social benefits:

As a writer, professor, and community organizer, Obama was greeted coolly by some of his fellow legislators when he arrived in Springfield in 1998 to take a seat in the Illinois Senate. How was this ink-stained, poshly educated greenhorn supposed to get along with Chicago ward heelers and conservative downstate farmers? By playing poker with them, of course.

In that case, the gambling was only an illusion of risk. What he was really after, he couldn't lose.

The rest of the article is more interesting than that idle speculation. It's about poker as a kind of national game for America.

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or another calamity strikes, most people stay in their homeland. The self-selecting group that migrates, seldom more than 2 percent, is disproportionally inclined to take chances. They also have above-average intelligence and are quicker decision makers. Something about their dopamine-receptor systems, the neural pathway associated with a taste for novelty and risk, sets them apart from those who stay put.

While the factors involved are numerous and complex, the migratory syndrome has been deftly summarized by the journalist Emily Bazelon: "It's not about where you come from, it's that you came at all." The migratory gene must have been even more dominant among those Americans who first moved west across the Appalachians, up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, then out to California during the gold rush. Their urge to strike it rich, often at the risk of their lives, made poker more appealing than point-based trick-taking games like whist, bridge, or cribbage.

The national card game still combines Puritan values—self-control, diligence, the slow accumulation of savings—with what might be called the open-market cowboy's desire to get very rich very quickly.

I'm not sure how much 'cowboys' are about getting rich quickly; there are fewer better roads to a long life of hard work than trying to raise beef in America. Further, the settling of the majority of the West was not quite the same kind of 'chosen migration' as the settling of America in general. Most of the settlers of the mountain West were displaced Southerners following the Civil War. The point still holds, since they were themselves the descendants of those who chose to come to America, and push into and past the Appalachians; however, the reason so many of them went West was that the South's economy was destroyed by the war and its ruinous aftermath. Home couldn't support them anymore.

Indeed, necessity drove most of them in the first place: the big waves of immigration from Scotland were enforced by the clearances, which we were discussing the other day. The big waves from Ireland, mid-century, were enforced by the famine. A lot of these 'natural gamblers' started the game with little to lose.

Yet they did well, and very well, before the Puritans caught up with them and set up all these rules and regulations. Try starting a business now, and see how much chance you've got. ("Yes, you can start a business. There are 4,000 pages of regulations you'll have to obey, most of them with attendant fines and/or prison time; and you'll need to provide health insurance for your workers, including for at least six months after they leave your company under COBRA; and you'll need to pay them not less than minimum wage, which we'll negotiate for you in advance; and, of course, there will be stiff taxes on any earnings you manage, in order to ensure that we provide for those you're not employing; and...")

A little more poker in the national spirit would be good.

Swords for Peace

Swordfighters for Peace:

It's not so outrageous. After all, the Prince of Peace said, "[I]f you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one."

Crows Fly Backwards

Crows Fly Backwards:

...to keep the dust out of their eyes.



Unfortunately, this is a terrible version of this song, which is otherwise delightful. You can hear a good version on Pandora (h/t for that to Cass, who introduced me to it years ago). It's worth the pain of digging around for it.

Rush to Heap

Rush to Heap:

I have never seen a man for whom so many rushed to heap honors at his feet. In readings of history, I can think of only one parallel, which is when the children of imperial lineages would receive high honors simply for having been born the child of a great man. Few of them amounted to much, and that with a lifetime's training and experience, because the greatness for which they were honored was not their own.

"Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit..."

Indeed, neither fruit nor seed, nor first leaf, nor early shoot.

McQ

Photo of the Year:

At BlackFive, via McQ.

UK Writer Loves Kilts

Another Way:

Apropos of our last discussion on modern women and manly men, a former British ambassador responds to a troll. The subject of the dispute is whether or not the British government was willing to obtain CIA evidence obtained using what the ambassador considers to be torture -- a fairly serious matter all the way around, from the question of what constitutes torture to the question of whether the government of the UK was willing to be complict in it. So, of course, it drew a serious response.

Precisely 38 minutes after I posted a blog entry pointing to definite proof of Jack Straw's complicity in torture, one Helen Wright added this comment, which I thought deserved a wider audience:

Apparently you enjoy sex with a kilt on and like to smack womens arses while singing Scottish songs. You are a man of questionable morals and brough shame on our country. Crawl back under your rock, you slimeball.

I am shocked. You mean there's another way to have sex?

Obviously, it is possible to dispense with the kilt. Not necessary, of course -- that's one of the beauties of the kilt.

By the way, the Stone Mountain Scottish Highland Games are the weekend after next. If any of you mean to be there, let me know.

Mystery Solved

Mystery Solved?

You know why we're having a financial crisis now -- Social Security, Medicare, Federal pensions? Why Europe is falling apart? It's because people stopped having kids. Birth rates have fallen across the Western world.

Why? A new study says: because the pill doesn't just block fertility: it makes women want something other than a real man. Even when women are wanting children, the altered hormones have turned them aside from the natural markers that would point to a strong man of great virility. Birth control was the problem all along.

If that is right, two lessons:

Lesson one: Mess with your hormones at peril.

Lesson two: The Church was right again.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck:

This guy is something else.

I've only watched one episode of his work, so I don't know that much about him. He is not what we've come to expect from the media, or the world. "They were talking at people, they weren't listening. They don't understand that people actually care about things -- can actually believe in things. Can be genuine, can weep for their country, can love something so much that they're willing to set everything aside for that: that the country and the Constitution mean something deeply to a lot of people."

The guy is dangerous.

"Dangerous!" cried Gandalf. "And so am I, very dangerous... and Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin, for you are dangerous yourself[.]

"Dangerous" is not a negative quality. Dangerous merely means that you are serious, that there are things you will not let go. The question is whether you are benevolent, or malevolent.

That key is being turned. And I fear an event. I fear a Reichstag moment, God forbid, another 9/11, something that will turn this thing on: power will be seized and voices will be silenced. God help us all.

Q: And if it happens, what should Americans do to fight it?

Read the Constitution. Act Constitutionally. Protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But that is no more than my oath. Indeed, many of us have sworn that oath. What will matter most is how we interpret the Constitution, and how we define its enemies.

Blue Stonehenge

Blue Stonehenge:

Earthquakes seem to come regularly, these days:

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called "Bluestonehenge", after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age....

"I think we have found incontrovertible proof that the river was very important to the people who used Stonehenge. I believe that the river formed a conduit between the living and the dead and this is the point where you leave the realm of the living at the river and enter the one of the dead at Stonehenge."

That's the big question. What did they believe, and so strongly that they found a way to transport megaliths hundreds of miles to erect in these monuments? What a gift it would be to know.

For My Sister

For My Sister:

...who has been spending a lot of time out Jackson way:

Bomb the Moon

Boom:

NASA prepares to bomb the moon.

Close, but no cigar, boys.

Free Speech

Free Speech:

The administration has declared against free speech at the UN:

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

Quite a statement, given the regularity with which the President's critics are said to be racist. The media is hereby charged with a "responsibility" to produce a "voluntary code" to "[combat] racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

Oh, bloggers' free speech will now also be regulated. This first entry into the field is mild, just the camel's nose probing its way into the tent.

Those actions by the Obama administration are almost certainly unrelated. This is not a conspiracy to undermine free speech. It's just the result of a commonly-felt hostility to it among the kind of people that Obama appears to appoint to important positions. There may also be some top-down pressure in certain cases, but I doubt it's being done in a coordinated way. It's just a reflection of who he is, and what kind of people he employs to do his work.

Things Have Changed

Things Have Changed Back Home:

A story from Forsyth County, Georgia, where I grew up:

An effort to crack down on prostitution in Forsyth County’s massage parlors has resulted in the arrests of three women, including one who faced the same charge last year.

The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office charged Mi Suk Yang, 47, of Marietta and Kil Cha Hurst, 65, of Jonesboro with prostitution on Wednesday....

There were probably prostitutes in the old days, but I don't recall having heard of any such arrests. Everybody knew each other then, before the explosion of the Atlanta suburbs caused the county I knew to cease to exist. Apparently prostitution arrests are now a regular thing.

(H/t FARK, who was amused by the lady's name. In general, it's always depressing to see your hometown mentioned in FARK.)

Mack the Knife

Mack the Knife:

My taste doesn't run to jazz, but I still enjoy Mark Steyn's writings on the history of 20th century music. The story of 'Mack the Knife' is unusually interesting even by his standard. Apparently the original was a 1728 London opera...

A Good Article

A Good Article:

National Affairs has a short, comprehensive look at the problems facing America's middle class. Indeed, the problems listed are a good definition of "middle class," one of the most difficult to understand concepts in American politics. If you share these problems, being neither too wretched to participate in the troubled institutions, nor too rich to have to worry about them, you're somewhere in the broad middle class.

It's a good frame for discussing the business before us: the collapse of Federal entitlements, the collapse of employer-provided entitlements, the demographic dangers, and so forth. In a seven-page article, there isn't much by way of solutions, but the sketches do offer some helpful advice: for example, that the worst way to deal with the entitlement crisis is with new taxes, but rather to use the government to encourage fertility rates and ease the raising of children.

Smart Diplomacy

Smart Diplomacy:

This is what comes of forgetting that you are not President of the World.

Quirk of Fate

So Close To Agreement:

By an odd quirk of fate, the last time we talked about Bernard-Henri Levy, it was in combination with today's topic, which is Garrison Keillor. The last time was about trying to reach out to our left-leaning brethren and explore a way in which we might be able to both have the America we want.

Something like that appears true again today. Much is made about Keillor's mean-spirited joke that we could solve the national debt if we eliminated Republicans (an unlikely proposition, given that only half of Americans pay income taxes, and most of those people are Republicans; seventy-five percent of income taxes are paid by married people, and being part of a married couple is perhaps the strongest indicator for membership in the Republican party. Heck, half of my marriage is Republican).

However, take a look at this earlier section of his piece, about the roots of the financial crisis:

...the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401(k)s, and all thanks to high-flyers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow.

Wow! That's perfect agreement between right and left about the cause of the disaster: reckless loans to people who couldn't pay it back. The only problem is that he prefaces and follows this assessment with a loopy way of blaming "the anti-regulation conservatives," rather than the anti-regulation liberals.

But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth! Reagan said that there was no limit to what could be accomplished if you didn't care who got the credit; the same is true if you don't care who gets the blame. So long as we're all agreed now that we can't be letting people borrow money who will not be paying it back, we can proceed. We can argue for years to come about whether the blame falls mostly on conservative "nihilism" about governance, or the alliance of some liberal politicians with corrupt inner-city predators. If we agree on a solution, we can set it in place, and have the fight about blame after.

Not a Joke

No Joke At All:

A commonplace of American humor is the joke taking the form, "Did you hear the one about the farmer's daughter?" This time, however, there is no joke: just a proud woman who has done a mighty deed.

Betrayal

Betrayal:

Stabbed in the back, man. I mean, who got this guy elected?

Seriously, a wise call by the administration on this issue. Given that it does put them crosswise with an important part of their base -- one whose continued goodwill they need very much -- it was a brave as well as a wise decision.

John Stewart is Wrong

John Stewart is Wrong:

Lancelot was a dragon slayer. He slew the dragon at the chapel near King Pelles' castle, on the occasion that he met Elaine (not the Lily Maid of Astolat, but the other Elaine, on whom he fathered Galahad).

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Stewart wasn't wrong, though, about his larger point.

Honor Means What?

The Philosopher's Petition:

Professor Althouse excoriates French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy for his failure to explain exactly why he feels that Roman Polanski should go free.

Even philosophers are sometimes free to write simple calls-to-action, but I do agree that it would be helpful if he explained some of his terms. I was particularly struck by this section:

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

Honor requires it?

Honor requires that the strong be a friend to the weak. In this case, the weak would be the girl, now apparently a married woman. Insofar as she seems to want the matter dropped, to judge from the press coverage, one might argue that it could be honorable to follow her wishes and allow the matter to drop. I don't think you could argue, however, that honor requires you to do so; and at least for the district attorney in L.A., his honor is quite clearly involved in doing his office to the best of his ability.

The comment was directed at the Swiss courts, though: their honor, apparently, requires them to release Polanski instead of turning him over to the United States. Why would that be the case? The Holocaust has been proposed as a reason that Europeans feel that Polanski has to be protected; his mother died in it, and he himself survived in the ghettos. Perhaps the claim is that European honor is concerned with protecting those they failed to protect before; the Swiss courts should feel an obligation to prevent the arrest and deportation of a Jew to his tormenters precisely because the French were once complicit in helping to send their Jews to earlier torments.

Yet the cases are entirely different; we are not talking about genocide, but about a perfectly lawful proceeding resulting from a violent crime to which he pled guilty. Protecting the innocent is one thing; protecting the guilty is quite another. Honor cannot be concerned with protecting the guilty.

What I am left with is the sense that Mr. Levy believes that Polanski's contributions as an artist are so great that Polanski's own honor should place him above spending the rest of his life in prison. Honor thus requires releasing this great man; it is absurd that an incomparable artist should languish in prison like a common criminal. After all, he crafted such masterpieces as this:



If that's the argument to be made -- that it is his personal honor that requires he be released -- the philosopher should remember that Polanski's is not the only honor that must be considered.

The honor of a 13-year-old girl is not a small matter. For the lady she became, we might forbear; but for her as she was, he ought to be destroyed. If the Swiss courts hold their hand because of honor, let it be to honor her and her wishes.

Honor is a Gift:

...but it isn't 'a gift a man gives himself.' It comes from what he gives for other things.

Fine movie, though.

Oceans 13

Oceans 13:

Fareed Zakaria loves serious people.

At the National Review's Web site, a debate -- an entirely serious debate among serious people -- broke out as to whether the speech proved that Obama actually wanted the world's tyrants to win, in the tradition of past intellectuals who admired Mussolini and Hitler. This is the discourse of American conservatism today: Obama is bad because he loves "death panels" and Hitler.

There is a serious case to be made that it's not worth taking the United Nations seriously, that it's an anachronistic institution based on 60-year-old geopolitics and a platform for tyrants and weirdos.

Reminds me of the opening threat in the move Oceans 13.

"So... some guys I take seriously tell me you're a serious guy."

And what happens when you ignore the warnings of the serious guys?



Only this time it's not a casino. It's the wealth of the United States.

Competing Thoughts

Failure Means Success:

On the one hand, the polling continues to get worse:

Independents now oppose ObamaCare by almost than 3-1, 72%-26%, which is almost the same as the Republican split at 79%-19%. More tellingly, a majority of independents (52%) strongly oppose it. Fifty-nine percent of seniors oppose ObamaCare, with the aforementioned 46% strongly opposing and only 16% strongly supporting it. But the news gets even worse in the preceding age demographics, with majorities in opposition among voters in their 30s (57%), 40s (65%), and 50-64 (58%). Among the 40s, a majority are strongly opposed (54%).

On the other hand, party insiders are saying, 'Hey, we can armwrestle this thing in!'

How can I be optimistic that Democrats alone can reform health care? Because these aren’t your parents’ Democrats. The single biggest reason, I believe, that the Democrats lost in a landslide in 1994 was because they failed on health care. More important, congressional Democrats believe it.

It's important that they believe it, but is it true? I was around in 1994 too, and what I recall people being angry about was that Democrats were attempting a government-takeover of health care, not that they failed to achieve one.

The counterargument -- I believe I heard Bill Clinton making it, once -- was that once the bill was passed, people would come to love the program. Perhaps, if our failure to understand it was the reason we hated the idea so much; but surely not by the 1994 elections, during which window even the greatest of such super-complex plans would still be bedeviled by confusion and disruption as people tried to figure it out and make it work. It seems to me that Democratic success would have increased the 1994 debacle, not lessened it.

I have tremendous respect for Megan McArdle, whose writings I've been reading since Elise recommended her earlier this month. She stated recently that she thought that some version of reform was almost sure to pass; even in the face of the new polls, she still thinks it's the way to bet. "But only if they move quickly. If it stretches beyond early November, I'd put the odds at less than 25%, unless they manage some surprise upset in the elections they look set to lose."

I'm going to bet otherwise, in spite of my respect for the lady. I'll bet that they can't ram the process through "quickly," because the will to do it isn't there. (Mickey Kaus was right about that). I'll bet further that the Democrats with concerns for their survival are going to want to find ways to delay the process until after those November elections -- after all, why not? It will give them a window into just how great the danger for them really is, and they can then make a more-informed choice.

The odds of health care reform passing look to me to be already below 25%. I don't think "Democrats" want it -- I think some progressives do. Unions now wonder about this whole 'tax Cadillac insurance plans' concept, since they've spent decades trying to set up such plans for their members; Blue Dogs are watching the heat index spike; the 'health insurance mandate' is going to be hugely unpopular (especially if it actually is passed -- the one group who still likes the idea of this plan are the young folks, who will have to fork over hundreds of dollars a year for something they don't need).

Then we'll rush on to cap-and-trade, which will... um, probably also fail, because it creates a massive tax on all Americans in return for "goodwill." 'What do I get out of this?' 'Well, the people of the world will like us better; and you get to feel good about saving the planet.'

The thing is, we've already extensively market-tested the idea that Americans will be willing to pay a premium for 'saving the planet.' If Americans aren't willing to shell out the extra cash for a Prius or a Chevy Volt versus a small gas-burner, they aren't willing to impose an across-the-board tax on every item they need for that purpose either. How many people shop at Whole Foods v. Wal Mart? There you go.

If the idea is that the government needs to step up and force us to do what we don't want, let me go out on a limb and suggest that these ideas won't be popular. Failure to pass these bills is the best thing that can happen to the Democratic Party -- and the country, as it happens.

It remains true that the most important public policy right now is deleveraging: reducing debt and obligations. This is the time to be cutting free of our runious debts, especially on entitlement spending. Just on retirement-entitlements, every American household already owes half a million dollars apiece. When the dollar collapses in value, it's going to be tremendously hard on every American family -- and it's because the government won't stop spending money, and won't stop making promises to spend money.

This isn't the hour for grand new schemes of progressivism. If they pass, they'll only hasten the collapse.

Damned Lies

All That 'Death Panel' Talk is Nothing But Lies:

Right?

...pages 80-81 of the [Senate Finance] bill. There it says: " "Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

The flaw here is obvious, except to BigGummint people who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.

Is the doc in the 'top 10' because he's a crook? Because he has really, really, really sick patients? Because he and the patients live in a very high-cost-of-living area? Or some combination of the above?

Makes no difference to those who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.

It'll make a difference to someone. Just no one who counts.

Seriously?

Seriously?

Wow.

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors' kids, or face the consequences.

"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.

So, when did it become illegal to stand at the end of your driveway and talk to your neighbors for a few minutes every morning? Even if the neighbors you are talking to are children, how can that possibly be illegal?

'The safety of the children' is a fine excuse, until you notice how seriously the government actually takes its.

President Obama's "safe schools czar" is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.

No, I think I'll rely on my own judgment where my neighbors are involved. Thanks, but no thanks.

Disaster Continues

The Disaster Worsens:

It was bad enough when we were being out-cowboy'd by the Russians. We're now being out-cowboy'd by the French.

Sarkozy: “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

“I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.

“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naive.”

It gets worse:



Riding a horse in the Camargue in April, Nicolas Sarkozy bore “a vague resemblance” to President Bush on his Texas ranch, a French newspaper said. --NYT

Update:
The Guardian has a neat little slide show of some of the pieces.

And another article here.

The gold includes spectacular gem studded pieces decorated with tiny interlaced beasts, which were originally the ornamentation for Anglo-Saxon swords of princely quality: the experts would judge one a spectacular discovery, but the field has yielded 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt collars, a find without precedent.

Somebody's select Fyrd got smashed, Maldon-like. I don't think this is some 'life-time' of hoarding--it's from a single campaign or battle.

"Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."

I know a reason why Grim likes the middle ages so much.

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire.

Experts say the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date to the 7th Century, is unparalleled in size and worth "a seven figure sum"....

...the most striking feature of the find was that it was almost totally weapon fittings with no feminine objects such as dress fittings, brooches or pendants.

"Swords and sword fittings were very important in the Anglo-Saxon period," Dr Leahy added.

"It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career.

Ah yes, the days when one decorated one's weapons with precious metals, gems and appropriate passages from Scripture.

As a side note, I was told over 20 years ago that the Anglo-Saxons were a much more wealthy society than anybody thought. And here we have some more proof, I think.

Bill Walks the Dog

Hmm:

Confess, Bill.

Antidotal History

Antidotal History:

The Times of London calls it "one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years." Why? Arts & Letters Daily explains:

That racist domination was the true basis for the British Empire has been repeated so often we forget how deeply false it is. Enter historian James Belich...

As an approach within the field of modern history, it's an earthquake. I shall have to try to locate a copy soon.

I keep saying it sounds better in the original German.

But hey, it is a snappy tune.

I keep telling people that you couldn't make this shiat up if you tried.

Newspaper apologizes

Newspaper Apologizes to Mrs. Palin:

You'll never guess why.

Today I must apologize to Mrs. Palin personally and on behalf of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for the choice of words used on the bottom of Wednesday’s front page regarding her speaking engagement in Hong Kong this week to a group of global investors.

We used offensive language — “A broad in Asia” — above a small photograph of the former governor to direct readers inside the newspaper to a full story of her Hong Kong appearance.

Hm. Well, it's nice to see the apology, anyway. Civility and all that.

To Arthur!

Two hundred and fifty years!

Now that's a legacy, boys. 'Cattle die, kin die,' but a good beer...

I Like The Headline...

...of this news story. The video is good too:



"The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous."

Well done.

Mass Sterilization

A Darker Whisper:

A woman who had fifteen abortions in sixteen years writes that she is worried about becoming the target of "fundamentalism." In reading her story, though, what jumped out were these lines:

Vilar's story is set against the backdrop of the American-led mass sterilization program in her native Puerto Rico from 1955 to 1969... [b]y 1974, 37 percent of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized in that experiment.

That is a claim I had never heard before. Here and here are a couple of '.edu' articles on the subject. There is a Wikipedia article on forced sterilization here. It states:

The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. The heads of the program were avid believers in eugenics and frequently argued for their program. They were devastated when it was shut down due to ethical problems. The principal targets of the American program were the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, people with epilepsy, and the physically deformed. Native Americans, as well as African-American women, were sterilized against their will in many states, often without their knowledge, while they were in a hospital for other reasons (e.g. childbirth). Some sterilizations also took place in prisons and other penal institutions, targeting criminality, but they were in the relative minority. In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States.

We should be well aware of previous attempts by our government to "improve" us through health care at this time. I wonder, though -- 65,000 is a very small number compared to the "37% of all Puerto Rican women" posited by the article. Today, there are just under four million Puerto Ricans; of whom about half would be women; of whom about half would be in childbearing ages. That would be one million women, not 65,000.

There is something wicked hiding here, but it is not yet clear just what it might be. Is it several small imps -- a small sterilization program, a love of eugenics, some racism, and a desire by later anti-Americans to over-tell a true story? Or is it a greater evil, which has somehow avoided our eye until now?

I should like to know more.

Synthetic Biology

Synthetic Biology:

An article that should warm the heart of at least one of our co-bloggers, on the subject of remaking the world through science:

The theory of evolution explained that every species on earth is related in some way to every other species; more important, we each carry a record of that history in our body. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to make it possible to understand why, by explaining how DNA arranges itself. The language of just four chemical letters—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—comes in the form of enormous chains of nucleotides. When they are joined, the arrangement of their sequences determines how each human differs from all others and from all other living beings.

By the nineteen-seventies, recombinant-DNA technology permitted scientists to cut long, unwieldy molecules of nucleotides into digestible sentences of genetic letters and paste them into other cells. Researchers could suddenly combine the genes of two creatures that would never have been able to mate in nature. As promising as these techniques were, they also made it possible for scientists to transfer viruses—and microbes that cause cancer—from one organism to another. That could create diseases anticipated by no one and for which there would be no natural protection, treatment, or cure. In 1975, scientists from around the world gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center, in Northern California, to discuss the challenges presented by this new technology. They focussed primarily on laboratory and environmental safety, and concluded that the field required little regulation. (There was no real discussion of deliberate abuse—at the time, there didn’t seem to be any need.)

The writers speculate that such technology could eventually end the energy crisis... assuming we don't end it first some other way. Still, the parenthetical note here is apt to strike you, as it strikes me, as extraordinary. The author writes:

Life on Earth proceeds in an arc—one that began with the big bang, and evolved to the point where a smart teenager is capable of inserting a gene from a cold-water fish into a strawberry, to help protect it from the frost. You don’t have to be a Luddite—or Prince Charles, who, famously, has foreseen a world reduced to gray goo by avaricious and out-of-control technology—to recognize that synthetic biology, if it truly succeeds, will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.

Yet there are also notes about basement crystal-meth labs, and other negative uses of technology. "At the time, there didn't seem to be any need." Is there now? Should we worry more about the harm to be done, or the joy to be had?

Blessed w/ Rain

"Looks Like We'll Be Blessed With A Little More Rain!"

The Etowah River is twelve feet high and rising, and it's said it will top fifteen feet high by tonight.

Weather report says it's going to rain every day for a week yet. We're all real happy about that, I can tell you.

Real Story Too Much GOVT

Too Much Gov't:

The real story in this Gallup poll isn't the fact that a near-majority of Americans thinks government is doing too much. It's the third graph down: since the administration of Bush I, there has only been one occasion where more Americans thought the government was doing too little: late 2001-early 2002, that is, right after 9/11. The question had a different context in those days, but even then, it was a brief moment.

"The government does too much" is the consistent winner outside of the immediate context of the 9/11 attacks.

The other thing I find interesting is the question of whether the goverment has "too much," "too little" or "about the right amount" of power. The "too little" faction barely registers, ever, on the poll.

These are long-term trends in American thought that are encouraging.

Religious Humor

Religious Humor:

I remember that once we had an occasion here -- I cannot seem to locate it in the archives, which are scrambled badly -- for telling religious jokes. Some of the best jokes I know are about religion, as they tend to speak to truths about disputes in doctrine or dogma that are really funny. One of my favorites is from the late, great Jerry Clower, who told the story of a couple who wanted to marry. The father would not accept the presumptive daughter-in-law, however, because she was not a Baptist but some lesser Protestant faith, and had only been sprinkled on her head rather than fully-immersed for her baptism.

The son offered his father a compromise: he would take the girl out into the river knee-deep with the Baptist pastor. The father refused; so the son came back and said his wife-to-be was ready to go neck deep. The father refused; soon the son said that his wife was prepared to go out into the river so far that only the top of her head was above water.

This, too, the father refused. The son replied, "See? I knew it was just that little spot at the top that counted anyway."

I thought of that when reading this piece by Christopher Hitchens on the jokesters of the day. His point is that liberal humor sneers at religion, but only when it is practiced by conservatives. Nevertheless, his examples are actually three very different types of humor. One of them is really funny:

One could actually write a whole article simply on the Franken-Stewart faction’s attitude toward religion. In their world, the expressions Christian right or Moral Majority are automatic laugh cues, and there is a huge amount of soft-core borscht-belt stuff like this (from Franken) on page 205 of The Truth:

If it hadn’t been for Social Security, I never would have met Franni in Boston my freshman year, deflowered her, and gotten her to renounce the Pope. But I digress.

And this, from pages 1 and 2 of Jon Stewart’s Naked Pictures of Famous People (his book America also carries a rib-tickling cover-line promise of Supreme Court justices posing nude) in a painfully unfunny essay/sketch titled “Breakfast at Kennedy’s,” set this time in Connecticut, at Choate:

That’s where Jack and I bonded. I was the only Jew. My father ran the commissary so I was allowed to attend school there. My room, or the Yeshiva, as Jack called it (he really wasn’t prejudiced and would often defend me to the others as a “terrific yid”), was a meeting-place and a hotbed for hatching great pranks … I’m sure the ample supply of brisket and whitefish from Dad helped.

And in a more goyish form from Stephen Colbert, by no means to be outdone, on page 56 of I Am America:

Now, I have nothing but respect for the Jewish people. Since the Bible is 100% the true Word of God, and the Jews believe in the Old Testament, that means Judaism is 50% right.

If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright...

The first piece is merely sneering and hateful, as Mr. Hitchens says. It's not the least bit amusing, except perhaps in the sense that Mr. Frankin is suggesting that a woman might prefer his love to the faith in which she was raised. But people do, sometimes; I've known both men and women who converted to new religions in order to marry, and in fact, we started with a joke on that very subject. That joke was funny because it smiled at the underlying differences; this one was not.

The second isn't really a religious joke at all, but an ethnic joke. It has nothing to do with doctrine, but is simply about being a minority among a majority. It's the same point that used to be made by black comedians, which is that blacks were once fully acceptable in American society if they were jokers or played in sports. Here, too, we have Mr. Stewart saying that he was accepted as a minority, but only because he provided some benefit to the majority -- humor, a place to plot pranks, free food.

The Colbert joke, though, is really funny. It underlines the oddity of the phenomenon that Israel's closest and most dependable ally is evangelical, even sometimes fundamentalist, Protestants in America. It even indicates the direction of the truth of that phenomenon, though of course -- being only a joke -- it doesn't adequately explain it.

You can enjoy such a joke even when it makes fun of you. This is described as a conservative joke:

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam going into downtown Chicago .
Nothing Is Moving north or south. Suddenly a man knocks on
his window.

The driver rolls down his window and asks, ‘What
happened, what’s the hold Up?’

‘Terrorists have kidnapped Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid,
Rosie O’Donnell, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. They
are asking for a $10 Million ransom. Otherwise, they are
going to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. We
are going from car to car, taking up a collection.’

The driver asks, ‘On average, how much is everyone giving?’

‘About a gallon’

That's a funny joke! But is it a joke about President Obama, etc., or is it a joke about conservative reactions to them?

The Root of Freedom

The Foundation of Liberty:

In a book review on a new work treating the problems of immigration and Islam in Europe, a remarkable quote:

The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Discussion question: What does it mean if an atheist says this? Presumably he doesn't believe the positive claims of Christianity any more, but he believes in the positive results of Christianity in bringing about a moral world.

A second question: Isn't it true that at least most of these things are strongly rooted in Christian teaching? I would call democracy the exception, given its pre-Christian, Greek rootsm and the fact that the Catholic Church for two thousand years preferred other forms; though the current Pope has strongly endorsed the American model.

As for Liberty: We've all read about the similarity between the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, composed at a monastery, addressed to the Pope.

The deeds of cruelty, massacre, violence, pillage, arson, imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns, and yet other outrages without number which he committed against our people, sparing neither age nor sex, religion nor rank, no one could describe nor fully imagine unless he had seen them with his own eyes.

But from these countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him Who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert. He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, met toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Macabaeus or Joshua and bore them cheerfully. Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

Our conscience and our ideas of human rights are chiefly the product of Christian inquiry in the Medieval period, and reactions to that in the Renaissance. Our human rights organizations, when they chide America or other Western powers for violations of the laws of war, are pointing to a field of study that arose in the Peace of God and Truce of God movements of the Middle Ages, the protection of noncombatants being their chief intent. The Geneva Conventions are rooted in nothing so much as the laws of war that Thomas Aquinas and others developed, perhaps most especially the Doctrine of Double Effect.

In a sense, I suppose, that's the same question. One of the principles that Christianity has created is the idea of religious liberty: out of the Thirty Years War and its echoes, we decided that it was proper for men to sort out for themselves what to believe. So here we have an atheist who has decided that he believes both that Christianity is untrue, and that it is of irreplaceable value. That ought to mean something profound; but saying just what that something is may be hard.

Try.

What Interns are For

A Shopping Trip:

The Aristotelian mean between the Clinton and Obama administrations on how to use your interns continues to prove elusive. The Clintons wanted them to do, ah, too much; and as for the Obamas...

Let's say you're preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don't have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here's how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. "Now it's time to buy some food," she told several hundred people who came to watch. "Let's shop!"

Health Care: Homestretch

Health Care: Homestretch

Going into the final push, things look good:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide now oppose the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the highest level of opposition yet measured and includes 44% who are Strongly Opposed.

Just 43% now favor the proposal, including 24% who Strongly Favor it.

So: total support is underwater even compared only to those Strongly Opposed. A clear majority is opposed.

That's before people have time to factor in this:

The Washington Times reports that Barack Obama has finally concluded that Joe Wilson was right, and that ObamaCare presents a big problem in handling illegal immigrants. Fortunately, the White House has found a solution to the problem. No, they’re not going to beef up enforcement or require identification before receiving subsidies and services. They’re just going to offer amnesty so that no one’s illegal anymore....

The Rass poll shows that there has been a fair bit of stability in the polling numbers. One normally wouldn't expect them to change much, then, if they haven't changed much through the August protests, etc.

Still, this is the kind of extraordinary statement that might nudge the numbers. Of the 44% of Americans who at least kind-of support health care, a strong part are union members. Announcing that the plan is linked to a major amnesty effort is one of the few things you could do to undercut rank-and-file union members' support for the plan. It won't make any difference to the organizations themselves, who look at the unionized healthcare workforce as too great a good to pass up. For the average union member, though, the picture is a little different.

Trade It For A Dog

"We Could Trade It For A Dog":

Doc Russia considers the business of raising a daughter:

The best part about it is that from this day on, I can always whip that reference out. when Domestic-6 complains about how tiring taking care of a baby is, I can just say "Hey, *I* wanted to trade her for a dog." When our lovely daughter does something to upset me, I can turn to her and say "you see... *this* is why I wanted to trade you for a dog." Of course, she will run to mommy and whine that Daddy said that he wanted to trade her for a dog, and she'll ask my lovely wife if that was true, and there will be just enough of a pause as Domestic-6 ponders how to answer that question for her to wonder for a moment if it's true.

Now, while this may seem cruel and heartless (two of my specialties), the sad fact is thhat I do not think that I can raise my daughter as anything besides a tomboy, and that means giving her a thick skin. You see, the boys I see growing up maturing in her cohort today are not being raised (for the most part) as men. No, they are something else entirely. So, I must raise a daughter under the presumption that there will be few men (classical men, I should say) available to her. This means no helpless little girl. No delicate little flower. Don't get me wrong; I do want her to be feminine, well-groomed and beautiful. It's just that she is going to have to be the kind of woman who has to make sure that she doesn't mix up her Chanel No. 5 and her Hoppe's No. 9.

While I did once think up a name for a daughter, in the days before it was clear we were meant to have a son, I don't know that I gave much thought to how I'd raise one. I have to admit that I don't think I'd do it very differently. Any daughter of mine would come up knowing how to fence and fight, sing and ride horses, shoot and tell the truth.

It'd be an interesting exercise, to be sure. Perhaps the Good Lord might find it amusing, in which case I might yet have the chance to try it out. Give Doc your best, anyway, because he's very busy with his new job, house-hunting, and the baby-plans to boot.

And hey, Doc, cheer up: you can always marry her off to mine. (This is how those arranged marriages in other cultures happen so early, in case any of you ever wondered about that.)

Sucks to be ya'll.

Sucks To Be Ya'll:

So today the President announced that we would not be building anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe. There were two reasons we had thought we would be: as a hedge against Russia, whose invasion of Georgia last year shows that it is ready to use military force against even US allies; and because such defenses would allow us to protect Western Europe against Iranian nuclear missiles, should they be developed.

Two other items of interest for today:

It is the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe.

The IAEA says Iran is definitely developing nuclear weapons.

Sleep well, Poland.

So, if they take our guns away, can we use swords instead?

They appear to work:

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo's house and taken two
laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises
coming from the garage out back.

The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn't run. He didn't call the police. He
grabbed his samurai sword.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.

Bad Idea

You'd Think Someone Would Grasp...

...that this is not the right time for this particular idea.

This week the House is scheduled to approve H.R. 3221, an education lending bill that CBO reports will increase the deficit by $50 billion. The bill includes a little-known provision to give the Secretary of Education $500 million - to be provided to to any entity he deems “appropriate” - to develop and disseminate free and “freely available” online courses....

Federal curriculum is contrary to longstanding government policy - and it’s unnecessary. For decades, Federal law has prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from exercising control over the “curriculum, program of instruction . . . or over the selection or content of library resources, text books, or other educational materials by any educational institution or school system.

The school speech went over so well, I can't imagine why anyone would object to the Feds appropriating money to write curricula for students. By all means, full speed ahead with this new Federal action! Come on, folks, work with us.

I was over at one of our local primary schools for a martial arts event, and I saw what they did with the Obama speech. One of the teachers assigned a creative writing project that, I gather from the results, was something like:

'Imagine that President Obama announces that he has repealed the Bill of Rights. Write a letter telling him why he should keep it instead. Please explain which amendment is most important to you, and why.'

I noticed that the clear victor among 'most important amendment' for these Georgia children was the 2nd Amendment; the runner-up was the 1st Amendment, for its protection of religion.

I suppose I'll have to do my part as a good citizen and schedule a meeting with the principal, though, to express some concerns.

I don't really object to the idea of asking children to imagine the government violating the Constitution, and to think about what their duty as citizens entails if it does. That's good civics; it's something we should all think about, whoever is currently in charge in Washington.

However, it's very bad civics to fail to convey that the President has no power to repeal the Bill of Rights. The President is not involved in Constitutional amendments of any sort. They are formulated in Congress and ratified by the states; or they are formulated by a Constitutional Convention, once a supermajority of states has called for one. In the event that a President declared that he was suspending the Bill of Rights, then, a rather stronger response than a polite letter would be called for from the citizenry.

In the unlikely event that some President should make such a declaration down the road, I'd hate for today's children to come away thinking, "Oh, dear. Teacher said this might happen. I guess I'd better write a letter."

Meanwhile, if it's not the right time for the Feds to be trying to write curricula, it's probably also not the right time for asking the students to imagine that President Obama is about to suspend the Constitution. Tensions are a bit high right now, as some of you may have noticed. I like the concept of having people think about their duty as citizens to restrain government abuses, but it might have been better to formulate the exercise in a slightly more theoretical way. ("Imagine some future president...", etc.)

China History

History & Tourism in China:

When we were in Hang Zhou, we used to encounter Chinese tour groups occasionally. Hang Zhou was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the site of a scenic lake called Xi Hu ("West Lake"), once home to poets and philosophers as well as the lords of the realm. It's certainly worth going to see if you happen to be in the area. It's about eighty-five miles southwest of Shanghai, linked by rail, so you could do it in three days or so.

(The photos at the link are carefully cropped so as not to show much of Hang Zhou itself, which -- excepting a narrow corridor along the lake and around the university -- is a classicly Communist city. I noticed right before we left that I had done the same thing, so I went back and took photos of all the trash, open sewers, and falling-down International Style buildings... someday, I should dig out those photographs and scan them, both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones.)

The Chinese Tour Group is characterized not just by the megabuses, but by a uniform. The tourist is issued a cap and t-shirt in a matching color -- usually bright red, but possibly bright yellow, in Hang Zhou. They are marched in formation around the city by a tour guide dressed in the same uniform, but distinguished by her megaphone. Important facts are shouted through the megaphone during the march around the city. It's really something to see.

One thing that struck me toward the end of the video was the remarks about China being the 'land for big dreams.' In a sense, that's really true, and it's the one part of China that makes me wonder if some of the China-boosterism has something to it. I don't expect China to overtake America in power, or equal American power, anytime soon; but it is certainly true that it's easier to try a "big idea" in China than here. That used to be America's strength, but it is gone now.

There are two reasons for this: America is expensive, so big ideas are harder to fund; and America is heavily, heavily regulated. Everything you might want to do is surrounded by laws and regulations, and the threat of lawsuits. None of that dogs the big dreamer in China; and his money goes about eight times as far.

Bill Clinton = Racist

OK, I Got It:

I wasn't that put off by Ms. Dowd's column, because... well, because it was Ms. Dowd. The NYT's rival, however, has this analysis of her piece today:

"For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both."

Well, not the entire South. Bill Clinton is a southerner. Then again, he supported a white candidate against Obama, didn't he?

Good point. What could possibly explain that? Racism, obviously.

A Better World Through Piracy

A Better World Through Piracy:

What happened to that good old king-beheading sentiment after the English Civil War?

This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of Snelgrave’s crew cried out, “For God’s sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.” At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that “my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.” ....

What if [pirates] added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism may have fallen like a lit match into the islands’ population of paupers, heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill’s suggestion, the historian Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe that pirate society “built a better world”—one with vigorous democracy, economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their contemporaries for “their casual brutality.”

Howard Pyle wrote, in his Book of Pirates, "[W]ould not every boy, for instance -- that is, every boy of any account -- rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?" Apparently, it's more fun for academics, too.

My favorite lines, though:

A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate motives generated ‘enlightened’ outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be a subtle question.

A subtle point, indeed.

A Poem of Tournament

A Poem of Adventure:

From Sir Thomas Malory:

In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened but he found strange adventures; and so they rode, and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream a fair fountain, and three damosels sitting thereby.

And then they rode to them, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was three score winter of age or more, and her hair was white under the garland.

The second damosel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head.

The third damosel was but fifteen year of age, and a garland of flowers about her head.

When these knights had so beheld them, they asked them the cause why they sat at that fountain? We be here, said the damosels, for this cause: if we may see any errant knights, to teach them unto strange adventures; and ye be three knights that seek adventures, and we be three damosels, and therefore each one of you must choose one of us; and when ye have done so we will lead you unto three highways, and there each of you shall choose a way and his damosel with him. And this day twelvemonth ye must meet here again, and God send you your lives, and thereto ye must plight your troth. This is well said, said Sir Marhaus.

NOW shall everych of us choose a damosel. I shall tell you, said Sir Uwaine, I am the youngest and most weakest of you both, therefore I will have the eldest damosel, for she hath seen much, and can best help me when I have need, for I have most need of help of you both.

And so did a young knight choose a lady of sixty years age; nor, when Sir Thomas Malory recounted it to his audience of bold knights and bold ladies, did that seem so odd a thing.

A Poem of Torment:

From A Celtic Miscellany, entry 52. The poet is an Irish man called Uilliam Ruadh (which is to say, "Red William").

I am ensnared by the maid of the curling locks.

Alas for him who has seen her, and alas for him who does not see her every day; alas for those trapped in her love, and alas for those who are set free!

Alas for him who goes to meet her, and alas for him who does not meet her always, alas for him who was with her, and alas for him who is not with her!

A true picture, and one of many like it. Many of the poems of love, from Ireland and Wales and Scotland, reflect the values of the courtly love tradition quite highly.

Not that all these poems are sad. You may enjoy entry 40, a Welsh version of Tristan and Isolde, which ends differently from the tragedy you may have heard before.

A Sign:

A Sign:

Two million people came to protest creeping socialism; one of them brought a sign.