Separate Worlds

Separate Worlds:

Democracy Corps has been down Georgia way.

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure – which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush – but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. They overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion – but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives.

Their ears work. I've heard that sentiment expressed several times lately.

The argument is difficult to counter, more difficult than you might imagine. The reason it's hard is that all of the facts are in their favor, and the only thing against them are unprovable: questions of intention, of character, of the meaning behind observed acts.

The facts are these:

1) America is the most powerful nation in the world, and has set the terms of international debates for more than a decade.

2) This power results from three basic things: military strength, the superiority of the market instead of central planning to make basic decisions, and the strength of our economy (this last to include the dollar's position as a reserve currency).

3) Therefore, to undermine that strength, you'd need to undercut all three things.

4) The Obama administration has asked for deep cuts in military spending, while continuing to maintain a heavy deployment schedule in two wars. The Obama administration has also called for unilateral cuts in our strategic nuclear forces. These actions undermine both our conventional and nuclear military strength.

5) The Obama administration has nationalized major industries and banks, not completely, but enough to give the government a controlling interest in the corporation. The argument that taxpayer money is going to these corporations, and therefore that the corporations must submit to government designs whenever the government feels it is important. These actions have vastly reduced the role of markets, and increased the role of central planners, at the center of major decisions in our economic life.

6) The destruction of the dollar is well documented. Obama's major remaning initiatives are health care reform and cap and trade. If successful, the first intends to result in a further government takeover of a massive part of the economy, again working against markets; furthermore, the expense of the thing will compel much higher taxes at some point. The addition of a major new entitlement adds to the fiscal crisis already expected from Medicare, Social Security, and pension funds. Cap and trade will likewise suppress US industry and call for higher taxes, perhaps passed on as "higher prices" on goods, across the economy. These actions undermine our fiscal strength, and make it more likely that the nation will be bankrupted.

7) Therefore, the Obama administration has acted to weaken all three pillars of American strength. Its stated agenda will further weaken all three pillars, perhaps to the breaking point in the case of fiscal policy.

Now, all of that comes from nothing more than reading the headlines. Usually, conspiracy theories are fairly easy to counter because they have some lie at their center: the famous Truther bit about how steel can't be melted by fire(!), or the idea that a missle hit the Pentagon, or whatever. None of this is undocumented. Obama has called on the military to cut its budget while fighting two wars; he has purchased interests in major banks and corporations, and then used those interests to issue orders to the corporations; the dollar has suffered a serious undermining in world markets, to the degree that there is talk of replacing it as the world's reserve currency; and the debates on health care and cap-and-trade both involve the eventual admission that higher taxes or prices will be necessary.

What remains is to argue that all of this is resulting from the Obama administration's adherence to bad economic philosophy, rather than from a secret plan to ruin America. You're left to argue that yes, these things are happening, but it's because the President has no executive experience. He's never run anything in the real world before. His people genuinely believe in their claims that the government can plan better than the market, and will make better decisions. They're trying to help, in other worlds; they just don't realize the effects their decisions will have, because they are too young, too inexperienced, or have lived lives too removed from the private sector and too insulated by government or academia from personal economic consequence.

Then they remind you of Obama's several apology tours in which he's essentially stated that America has been wicked up until now, but he's going to fix us. Everyone reading blogs is well aware of the Rev. Mr. Wright, Bill Ayers, Ms. Dunn and her Maoist credentials, etc., etc. So are people here. There is, in other words, plenty of empirical evidence on his feelings and associations that reasonably reinforces the worldview.

Democracy Corps says that this means that conservative Republicans are going to have a hard time appealing to others in future elections, because the chasm in worldviews is so wide.

I don't know if that's true or not. It seems just as likely to me that, if things don't get better between now and 2012, other people may decide that these folks may be right. The famous "confirmation bias" suggests that people first decide if you are "good" or "bad," and then interpret everything to fit the profile. Right now, most Americans have their mental switch on Obama flipped to "good," and so they are interpreting all this as unconnected difficulties associated with a challenging situation and inexperience. If that switch flips to "bad," it all becomes convincing evidence of a desire to undermine the nation's strength.

That's where we are now. Obama's favorability ratings line up with this worldview nicely, with both personal negatives and this worldview being higher in the South, and among Republicans. People outside the South, and independents, are more likely to view Obama as personally favorable -- which means they are unlikely to consider him a wicked tool of evil interests.

If unemployment continues at a heavy rate for a long time, some people may find their switch flipping. As they begin to view him unfavorably, they become open to the argument that he might be actively wicked instead of accidentally wicked. There's plenty of room for conversion as the economy grinds down, because his plans will either fail or succeed: if they fail, they won't help; yet if they succeed, the extra taxes and costs will make things worse.

Some may argue that it doesn't matter whether the President is actually trying to destroy the country, or is merely destroying it by accident. It does matter, though. It's very important how we perceive him, because it defines our duty as opponents of the agenda. If you believe as I do, your duty is the duty of the loyal opposition: to try to swing policy through debate and argument, but to support at least foreign policy wholeheartedly once the debate is over. Afghanistan is a good example of this: I hope to inform the debate we are having, but once a decision is made I will, as our military will, try to help bring about whatever we decide to do.

If the President is a "domestic enemy," actively trying to destroy America, your duty may be very different. The performance of that duty creates a world that I hope we'll not have to live in. If you do believe, let me suggest this: it would almost certainly be better for the nation to be led for four years by a wicked man who wanted to destroy it, chafing within the confines of the separation of powers, than to suffer what would come from traveling those roads.

Inspired Commies 2

Those Inspiring Communists II:

One good thing the Communists did inspire was jokes at their expense. West German spies used to collect them:

Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never survive on just two bananas a year.

What would happen if the desert became Communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.

A new [East German car] has been launched with two exhaust pipes -- so you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

The Chinese had jokes too.

It was like that in those days. As soon as you went into the shop it went like this: “Serve the People!” Comrade, I’d like to ask a question.

A: “Struggle Against Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism!” Go ahead.

B: [to the audience] Well, at least he didn’t ignore me. [Back in character] “Destroy Capitalism and Elevate the Proletariat!” I’d like to have my picture taken.

A: “Do Away with the Private and Establish the Public!” What size?

B: “The Revolution is Without Fault!” A three-inch photo.

A: “Rebellion is Justified!” Okay, please give me the money.

B: “Politics First and Foremost!” How much?

A: “Strive for Immediate Results!” One yuan three mao.

B: “Criticize Reactionary Authorities!” Here’s the money.

A: “Oppose Rule by Money!” Here’s your receipt.

B: “Sweep Away Class Enemies of All Kinds!” Thank you.

Most Chinese humor doesn't translate well, because it is word play depending on the tremendous number of like-sounding words. That's pretty decent satire, though.

Ironhead

Ironhead:

I ran across this old bit featuring Waylon Jennings the other day.



His musical advice on the way forward sounds very much like our Eric Blair.

Those Inspiring Communists:

First Thomas Friedman, but he's just a journalist from the New York Times. To someone of that particular distinction, covering up the horrors of Communism must seem like an honorable tradition of the firm.

Now it's someone from the White House.

Chairman Mao is an important figure in military science, and anyone who intends to fight a guerrilla war -- or resist one -- needs to read his writings on the subject.

Ms. Dunn is sketching that position by claiming that she's talking about his thoughts on how to fight war, but that isn't really what she's doing. What she's doing is claiming him to be an inspirational philosopher, because 'he did it his way,' and didn't let others tell him it couldn't be done.

Having listened to her speech, you don't know anything about what his insights into that particular war might have been, or how he differed from Saddam. Yet Saddam, too, 'did it his way' and refused to listen to those who told him it couldn't be done. He had a plan too: a plan to resist conventionally, and a backup guerrilla plan that included massive pre-lain caches and support zones seeded with allied families and tribes. Nevertheless, he ended up being plucked out of a spider hole, and hanged a few years later, having led his movement into disaster.

People who learn only the lesson to 'do it your way, and don't listen to those who raise concerns' are at least as likely to end up badly. To the degree that Mao is worth studying, it's to learn how he defied the odds -- how he developed his plans and used his forces, brought pressures to bear, and sustained his movement to victory.

As for the rest of Mao's "philosophy," it's chiefly worth studying to learn how completely it failed. The "Hundred Flowers" movement, wherein intellectuals were encouraged to speak truth to power? Great idea, very inspirational; led to the slaughter or re-education of China's entire educated class. The "Great Leap Forward," wherein China was going to swap out from an agricultural to an industrial economic base? Wonderful thought, very progressive and bold; led to the starvation of tens of millions.

That's the thing to study, if you're going to look at Mao. The chief, key lesson of his life is the horror and misery he brought to everyone he touched.

Punt NFL

Punt the NFL:

College football is better anyway. Go, mighty Bulldogs!



Who wants to watch a bunch of mercenaries who'd leave your team for the first better offer? The college students are, at least, your own true sons and neighbors.

Victory

Victory:

People used to ask, "Can you define what victory in Iraq might look like?" How about this?

I think this makes it official: the liberal Brookings Institution is apparently no longer bothering to update their Iraq Index, with the last update having been done on September 1st. Final score: 8500-11000 MW of power (vs. 4000 prewar), vastly improved access to potable water/sanitation/trash removal, something like five hundred times as many cellphones, a million people with Internet access in a country that previously had essentially none, a tripling of GDP, billions in foreign investment, national debt halved, and thousands of trained judges. Even the endemic fuel shortages appear much ameliorated, with the number of Iraqis saying they had good access to fuel rising from 19% in 2008 to 68% this year. Oh yeah, and a fairly liberal Arab constitutional democracy with basic rights for minorities, including the rights of voting, free press, free assembly, and free speech.

Meanwhile, the security situation in Iraq is better than ever (and far, far better than the average ~7,000 a month killed under Saddam), with icasualties reporting an incredibly low 158 deaths total in September -- the lowest ever recorded....

Iraq is still literally the unthinkable victory. If [opponents currently in office] want to lay any claim to credible analysis of ongoing events in the GWOT, they will need to start acknowedging this basic, painful fact: we won.

They don't, however. They declared the GWOT over, some time ago now.

Slander

Slander:

Once again, MSNBC is host to a vicious, nasty attack directed at a lady because she doesn't hold 'progressive' political opinions. Jenn Q. Public has a list of prior offenses for the character involved here, one Keith Olbermann. He's one of the few TV hosts I'm familiar with, because AFN played his show in the DFAC about the time I'd take lunch chow every day.

Ms. Public has covered some of his historic offenses, but it's worth remembering the treatment Chris Matthews gave the same lady. Zell Miller remembered it, in the famous interview he did with Chris Matthews after his 2004 speech at the Republican National Convention.

Zell was right: it is a shame that we can't challenge people to a duel. As a distant second-best option, however, Ms. Public suggests you might write the network. Since these networks are in show business, and controversy means viewers, I doubt that will do more than encourage the thuggery; but if you like, she has the addresses on her site.

UPDATE: In the comments section of a post about Google searches as they apply to the failed relationships between modern men and women, Cassandra writes:

I rarely hear anyone acknowledge that a man who behaved the way many men behave today would have been shunned by society when I was growing up. Men, too, are demanding that behaviors society has never approved of be not just legitimized but mainstreamed and approved of.

I would not want to have to raise a daughter in today's climate.

This is exactly the kind of thing she's talking about. The reason we've got this kind of behavior going on is that we've created a society in which the rude are completely protected from any sort of reprisal.

It's exactly like the way that virtual communication leads to flaming: because you have removed the physical elements of the communication, there's nothing except personal character to stop people from flaring up emotionally at each other. This is a well-known phenomenon among bloggers, though it predates blogs, and has been observed since the beginning of internet communication.

The removal of the duel -- and the practice of filing criminal charges for assault every time a jerk gets a punch in the face -- has performed a similar transformation on non-virtual society. Neither Chris Matthews nor Keith Olbermann is the sort who would dare to speak that way in the presence of a man like Zell Miller if he were permitted the duel he wanted, even though Zell is spotting them both about fifty years.

Instead, modern society has made the good men powerless to do anything about the bad ones. You can point out that they are mannerless, cowardly puppies; but the more they get called names, the more attention they get, and the more money they make. They are actually rewarded for their bad behavior. Of course you're seeing more bad behavior as a result, and of course their model is being emulated by young people who witness it and see it being rewarded.

Like the internet flamer, they find that all restraints on their worst impulses have been removed. There is nothing to stop them from being abusive except their personal character. If they have any, it is clearly overwhelmed by the actual monetary rewards paid to them for generating controversy.

Of course things are getting worse: there is a powerful, practical mechanism to encourage them to get worse. There is no similar mechanism to ratchet things back the other way. It's been removed from society, and we are seeing the natural consequences of that.

UPDATE: Cassandra's use of Google inspired me to do a little self-check to see how well we've lived up to these standards here. I Googled grimbeorn.blogspot.com for three common insults used against women. (You can click the links to see the terms, if you wonder which ones I searched for, but your imaginations will probably work fine.)

In the history of the site, there are three uses of the first, plus one use of the "-y" version: all in block quotes from other pieces, one of them a reference to a man ("son of a..."); two of the others quotes from other women (including Peggy Noonan!); and the third a quote from a Navy SEAL, who was not directing it at women particularly, but just employing a profanity to suggest emphasis in the way that sailors will.

There are no instances of the second.

The third has one citation, another block quote, from an author who agrees that Britney Spears "dresses like a...," but not that she is one.

All of the posts featuring quotes including these words were mine. None of my co-bloggers have ever employed any of them, even in block quotes from other places. I'm proud of them for that, and want to say so.

I invite readers to apply a similar test to any male-run progressive site they like.

Profanity isn't everything, though. Equally important is your treatment of individual women to whom you are opposed politically or culturally. You might wish to contrast our treatment of, say, Cindy Sheehan with how Mrs. Palin was treated at those progressive sites.

For those of you who choose to test your own sites, and are ashamed with what you find? I call on you to do better in the future.

A Public Service

A Public Service:

Obviously, the critics of the rhetoric on the right are better-founded than I knew. This is the kind of reckless, irresponsible... er, wait, no.

Actually, this is from season one. They're now on season three, which would make this a couple years old. We had a totally different President then.

Nothing bad here! This was just edgy, push-the-envelope comics who represent the clever, creative parts of our great nation. It's a mark of the rich intellectual nature of our society that we can accept satire that punches back against the powerful and their interests.

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.