Short Song

Twas a Short Song...

But a good one.





That seems like the sort of song that must be based on something. Joe, I think old popular opera songs is your department?

Empire

Use the Force:

The comments are the best part of this parody. It has its moments, though, even in the main text:

When the end came for Kenobi, he was found not in the remote uncharted areas of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive west from the Tatooine capital of Bestine. He had been living under the alias "Ben" Kenobi for some time.

The compound, only about 50 miles from the base of operations for the Imperial Storm Squadron, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, which were largely occupied by Tusken Raiders. When Imperial operatives converged on the planet on Saturday, following up on recent intelligence, two local moisture farmers “resisted the assault force” and were killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior Stormtrooper said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.

Continuing Education

Continuing Education

My neighbor, who lurks here, referred me to a website with short education videos on a variety of subjects. They're all free. When the author discovered that he had a knack for explaining technical subjects, it occurred to him that he could reach more people with his skill by publishing his lectures online than by teaching small classes in person. You don't see the lecturer at a podium but instead a blackboard with his live scribbles. I tried out a few series -- one on the use of commutators in electric motors, and one on differential equations -- and found his style engaging and helpful. It's a remarkable list of lectures, several hundred at least, covering everything from math to economics to hard sciences, from basic to college level. I'm going to recommend these to my friend who home-schools her son.

On the same note, because my sister has persuaded me to take a trip with her to France this fall, I thought I should brush up on my rudimentary French. I found some excellent free websites with phrasebooks, including audio clips.

All these lectures are an especially pleasant find because I've been engaged in recent weeks in a number of arguments over what has gone so wrong in public schools. It's nice to know that access to the Internet, which most Americans have, is enough to permit a motivated student to overcome a failed public education in a core math and science curriculum, and cheap, too.

Mother's Day

The Decline and Fall of Motherhood:

The New York Times has an interesting article on motherhood that I find, having read it, to fit in better with my understanding of 19th and 20th century history than the standard reading that we often hear.

ONE of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today.... That myth — repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, “The Flipside of Feminism” — reflects a misreading of American history.

There was indeed a time when full-time mothers were held in great esteem. But it was not the 1950s or early 1960s. It was 150 years ago. In the 19th century, women had even fewer rights than in the 1950s, but society at least put them on a pedestal, and popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.

When you compare the diaries and letters of 19th-century women with those of women in the 1950s and early 1960s, you can see the greater confidence of the earlier mothers about their value to society. Many felt they occupied a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.

The wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.” Americans of the era believed in “the empire of the mother,” and grown sons were not embarrassed about rhapsodizing over their “darling mama,” carrying her picture with them to work or war.

This is quite right, at least in the English-speaking world. The reign of Queen Victoria sparked a revival of interest in the ideals of chivalry, as we have discussed here before at length. Eric reminds us, rightly, that 19th century reconstructions of chivalry were different from the original in many respects; but they aimed at reconstituting the core of the thing, part of which was an ethic of mutual service between knight and lady, man and woman, husband and wife.

What went wrong? Frankly, the next part of the article is so heavily pointed in the direction of my own thoughts that I have to be suspicious of my ability to judge it. (Confirmation bias, and all that.)

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality[.]

How bad did it get?

In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.

Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.

In the same year, an information education officer in the Army Air Forces conjectured that the insidious dependency of the American man on “ ‘Mom’ and her pies” had “killed as many men as a thousand German machine guns.”

The ethic of chivalry -- or, if you like, both the medieval chivalry and the 19th-century chivalry -- was one that encouraged men to be guided by ladies. The era of Queen Victoria had heroic gentlemen whose highest aspiration was to be of service to the Queen; to be influenced by the lady herself was the highest praise. To be of service to any lady was great praise. As the biographer of Chretien de Troyes describes the work of his patron:

[She was] the Countess Marie de
Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor
of Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from
the South of France in 1137, first to Paris and later to England, may
have had some share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and
woman service which were soon to become the cult of European society.

Those hours -- renewed in the 19th century, and not abandoned yet by some -- were the height in all human history of the relationship between the sexes. However we came to the place where men were despised for being influenced by the women in their lives, it is a poorer place. This is Mother's Day, so I will simply close with a story that happened to me recently.

I stopped at a service station and, when I arrived at the door, I noticed that on the inside of that door was a woman confined to a walker trying to get out. I opened the door for her, and held it while standing aside as any gentleman would. As she passed me, she said: "Thank you, young man. Tell your mother that she did a blessed job."

I did just that, this morning. This, though, is the finest of things: it is what being a man is all about. To defend and to protect, to uphold those who find themselves struggling with a fate that has made them weak, these are the things for which strength was made. We are fortunate to enjoy it, for an hour. Strength will pass from us, and we to the grave, all too soon. To use our strength in a fitting way, while we are granted that extraordinary boon, is a great honor and a great joy.

On David Stokes' Thoughts on George W. Bush -

On David Stokes' Thoughts on George W. Bush:

I ran into this article recently - about George W. Bush in the aftermath of Bin Laden's capture. The author rightly gives President Obama some credit for inviting Bush to a ceremony at Ground Zero. He then discusses Bush's post-Presidential attitude, and includes this line:

Most people aspire to office because they want to “be” something. A few, in contrast, seek leadership roles in order to “do” something—and when that job is done, they move on with their lives.

I don't know if he's right to put Bush in the latter category, but I would love it to be true. The historical parallels are obvious. It's an attitude I try to cultivate towards my own rank - to remember that I don't have it because I am something special (it's not as if lawyers are rare), but rather as a tool to get things done. (For me - to open doors that need opening.) Should everyone? I doubt it.

Beowulf & C

On Noam Chomsky's Thoughts on Bin Laden:

Nor shall lilt of harp
those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven,
fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise
and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate
when he and the wolf were wasting the slain.

The famously anti-war thinker Noam Chomsky asks some questions that are, he says rightly, the sort of questions that ought to provoke thought. His thoughts and mine are rather different.

However, he is quite right to point out that the Taliban made an offer regarding Bin Laden in the event that we could show evidence of his guilt. As I recall, however, the Taliban standard governing guilt was the traditional sharia standard, that is, three eye-witnesses who would testify. We could probably meet that standard now, but it would have been hard to meet at the time. In any event, I do remember the offer, and I also regretted that we didn't try to take them up on it.

His remarks on the Iraq war are without merit; it was not an act of aggression ('the supreme crime,' etc.), but a legitimate and just response to humanitarian crisis. (As to which, Arts & Letters Daily has an interesting piece on the subject of how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky debated the subject of humanitarian intervention in their own day: you may not have realized that it was a concern in imperial Russia. The Tolstoy piece being cited also contains one of the most poignant descriptions of the fate of a philosopher who becomes unmoored from God; and of the necessity, and means, of bringing that ship back to harbor.)

How to respond, though, to this line?

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

I expect we might have invaded their country and overthrown its government, seen to a democratically elected replacement, and then turned the old leadership over for trial and execution. That seems like a reasonable surmise, all things considered.

I knew one of those Iraqi commandos, by the way; one of the tribal leaders I used to deal with fairly regularly in Iraq had been in the Special Republican Guard. I always liked him. He and I saw eye to eye, because his perspective was that of a tribal member of of an honor culture -- remember that "tribal" does not mean anything like "primitive," but in Iraq as in many other places is entirely integrated into the modern world. He has tribal duties as well as duties to the state, just as you may have family duties as well as duties to the state; and, like him, you may take the personal duties at times as being the more compelling.

He surely understands that the function of the Bin Laden raid is to deter violence. Honor cultures get this in a way that 'international law' types often do not. In the Beowulf, after the death of the dragon and the king, a warrior laments that the Swedes will now be on their way to pillage and plunder the Geats. With the strong defender gone -- and given the standing feud, and given especially the cowardly behavior of Beowulf's war band in the face of the dragon, with the noble exception of Wiglaf -- the coming of the Swedish raids is taken as a certainty. At the funeral that takes up the final verses of the poem, an old woman laments the coming doom and shame that will befall the Geats.

This killing of Bin Laden was an obligation of honor. We have fulfilled it, but it was he himself who required it of us. There was never any choice. Any man should know that.

Avoid Iran

Note to Self: Remove Iran from Vacation Itinerary

Not a good week to be in the service of the President of Iran. Or me, if I were there!

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

Special skills in metaphysics! Who knew that was a crime?

Busy Week

Busy Week:

Here at the undisclosed location, it's been a very busy week. I apologize for not being around more, but certain events have kept me engaged.

I trust you are all well. How about a little doom and gloom to take your mind off it?

Their methods are scientific and philosophical, and they all come down to trying to understand what all those zeroes in numbers like “6 billion” really mean. Scientists now have firmly grounded hypotheses about how Earth and the solar system will be different in 50 million years, for example, as distinct from 500 million or 50 billion, and can rule out some possibilities for what will happen at each point. Armed with data from history, they can use rough computer models to simulate how human populations might rise and fall, how their technology might accelerate, and how thousands or millions of years of human activity might or might not change the planet.

Most important, they’re systematically analyzing for the first time the worryingly numerous ways in which humanity might fail to survive to see that long future.

Isn't that what the girl says in the Terminator? "Look on the bright side -- in a hundred years, who's going to care?"

National Offend a Feminist Week 2011

National Offend a Feminist Week 2011

As anyone who's ever had fleeting contact with me probably already knows, I'm a feminist. But this is funny:

If happiness is the problem, feminism is the solution.

Feminism views all women as victims of patriarchal oppression, and any woman who is happy is therefore suffering from “false consciousness.” As soon as a woman becomes enlightened — once she is made aware of her victimhood — she will be miserable and angry. Which is to say, she’ll be a feminist.

Q. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. That’s not funny.

Feminism is a philosophy of militant misery. The humorlessness of feminists is therefore not accidental. And so feminists must be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

Now run along, sweetheart. And bring me a cup of coffee.

H/t Little Miss Attila.

Justice in the Rest of the World

Justice in the Rest of the World

Justice in the Legal World

Justice in the Legal World

The State of Virginia answers with a resounding "yes" the question: Will there be consequences when a big law firm publicly dumps a client for craven, pandering, PC reasons?

Last week King & Spalding announced that it would not continue to represent the U.S. House of Representatives in supporting the Defense of Marriage Act against a constitutional challenge in federal court. (The Obama Administration had already announced it would decline to oppose the challenge.) Another King & Spalding client, the Attorney General for the State of Virginia, concluded that he should reconsider his retention of the law firm to prosecute the state's ongoing challenge of Obamacare in federal court:

King & Spalding’s willingness to drop a client, the U.S. House of Representatives, in connection with the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was such an obsequious act of weakness that I feel compelled to end your legal association with Virginia so that there is no chance that one of my legal clients will be put in the embarrassing and difficult situation like the client you walked away from, the House of Representatives. . . . Virginia does not shy away from hiring outside counsel because they may have ongoing professional relationships with people or entities, or on behalf of causes that I, or my office, or Virginia as a whole may not support. But it is crucial for us to be able to trust and rely on the fact that our outside counsel will not desert Virginia due to pressure by an outside group or groups. . . . Virginia seeks firms of commitment, courage, strength and toughness, and unfortunately, what the world has learned of King & Spalding, is that your firm utterly lacks such qualities.

Ouch. I guess when a law firm plays politics, it works both ways.

"No Fair! You Tricked Me Into Thinking I Was Smarter Than I Am!"

"No Fair! You Tricked Me Into Thinking I Was Smarter Than I Am!"

Via Ann Althouse and Instapundit, I ran across this article, which I was sure would turn out to be a joke. Alas. A tax law professor at Pepperdine is outraged to discover that some law schools offer merit scholarships to incoming students with a high GPAs and/or LSAT scores, but they condition the continuation of the scholarship funds on the students' maintaining a "B" average in law school. What the crafty villains don't reveal is that only a fraction of students keep their law school GPAs that high. Not a tiny fraction, mind you, perhaps a third. Their nefarious motive? To attract students with high GPAs and LSAT scores who might not otherwise attend (thus boosting the schools' rankings), but only if the students can in fact excel in law school. Have you ever heard anything so cruel, so fraudulent, so self-interested?

The author of this article suggests that incoming students have no idea that law schools grade on the curve -- evidently a shocking crime in itself -- or that keeping a "B" average won't be a cakewalk for most of the incoming class, not all of whom can expect to be above average. And apparently the students practically never ask simple questions about the distribution of grades on which their continued access to free money will depend. As one law school official mused, “This isn’t meant to be sarcastic,” he said, “but these students are going to law school and they need to learn to read the fine print.”

I'm perplexed by the harm that's supposed to be suffered here. The students are free to finish law school with a "C" average, but they will have to take out student loans, which they will then have to pay back. They spend only one year finding out that they're not likely to graduate at the top of their classes, and therefore can expect a really tough time landing one of the higher-paying legal jobs. This is information that will come in very handy as they decide whether those student loans are a good bet. They've had one year of law school absolutely free, which (common perceptions to the contrary; I know what you're all thinking!) hardly disqualifies them for a useful and fulfilling life on some other career path.

*I like Ann Althouse's comment-board instructions, by the way:

Join our community of commenters. I'm big on free speech, but if you want to push its limits you'd better be interesting. You can't just stop by to drop an insult or a lie that you can't defend. Earn it. Or be circumspect.

May Day

May Day:

The May Day carol is a part of the memento mori genre, which has existed in the West since antiquity. Not only in the West: the samurai Daido Yuzan wrote:

One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by night, from the morning when he takes up his chopsticks to eat his New Year's breakfast to Old Year's night when he pays his yearly bills, the fact that he has to die. That is his chief business. If he is mindful of this, he will live in accordance with the paths of Loyalty and Filial Duty, will avoid the myriads of evils and adversities, keep himself free from disease and calamity and moreover enjoy a long life. He will also be a fine personality with many admirable qualities. For existence is impermanent as the dew of evening and the hoarfrost of morning, and particularly uncertain is the life of the warrior, and if he thinks he can console himself with the idea of lifelong service to his lord or unending devotion to his relations, something may well happen to make him neglect his duty to his lord and forget what he owes to his family. But if he determines simply to live for today and take no thought for the morrow, so that when he stands before his lord to receive his commands he thinks of it as his last appearance and when he looks upon the face of his relatives he feels that he will never see them again, then will his duty and regard for both of them be completely sincere, while his mind will be in accord with the path of loyalty and filial duty.

I have always thought it was wise advice.

The skeletons in the May Day carol's paintings appear to take the living by the hand and lead them away to the hidden land of the dead. The woodcut of the skeleton leading the child away from his family is particularly moving. Those who travel that road do not reappear, but vanish from the world of men -- just as a branch of May, full of flowers, will soon be gone as if it never had been at all.

Yet today we have a counterpoint in Rome. This tradition of the display of the incorrupt body has a significant history in the West. It has always seemed odd to me to disinter and display the body of the dead; if it were being done by someone other than the Pope, one might say it was sacrilegious. If in this case it is instead religious, it is still the sort of thing that strikes me as strange.

Surely it is intended to seem strange. The branch of May is provided to draw your attention to the order of the world, and remind you of something mysterious and true about it: the order of death, and our powerlessness to reclaim things lost in time. The display in Rome is meant to make an assertion to the contrary, and so of course it must seem strange: it is a claim made in defiance of the ordinary truths of the world.

"What Happened to Your Eyebrows?"

"What Happened to Your Eyebrows?"

If your mom never had to ask you that, you weren't doing it right.

The "Watts Up With That" site skewers a modern, safe, and boring Chemistry Set that advertises proudly on its cover, "No Chemicals!." What's really entertaining about the post is the trips down memory lane in the comments, where readers fondly recall blowing up themselves, their friends, and their environments in long-ago youth, before things got safe.

It reminded me of my own friends and family. A good friend in high school learned to make nitroglycerine and enjoyed setting vials of it in the middle of deserted fields and chunking rocks at them until they blew up. He let the sun go down on this game once and had to spend an anxious night chunking rocks out into the dark, tortured the whole time by the fear that a boy scout troop would wander into the explosive zone. When he set off his home-made volcano in science class, the fire department had to put it out. Another friend blew three feet of water out of the family swimming pool with the phosphorus he'd carelessly left in a bucket of water in the sun -- he noticed the perilously low water level just in time to throw the bucket into the pool.

It was the same, apparently, for the older generation: My father, who lost half of his hearing at an early age from this kind of thing (don't ever let a beaker of flash powder dry overnight in a school locker), often regaled us with antisocial stories about flushing sodium down the school toilets, which would cause every nearby toilet to geyser in an entertaining fashion. An excellent high school teacher of mine had lost a hand and an eye to a white phosphorus explosion, but was cheerful about life and learning nevertheless.

My favorite story from the comments:

In those days it was difficult to get my Dad’s attention, especially when he was working on one of his own projects. He tended to answer all questions and comments with a sort of, “Hmm,” without really listening to you. He was working away on an anvil in the cellar when my brother told him he had made some nitroglycerine. He said “Hmm,” turning away to get his hammer. While he was looking away my brother put some of the nitroglycerine on the anvil. Dad turned back, brought his hammer down, looked up at the hammer imbedded in the plaster of the ceiling, turned to my brother, and inquired, “What did you just say?”

I think I recognize the gentleman.

A Vision

A Vision:

From the lady, Hildegard Von Bingen.

Grim's going to love talking about this item.

So what is actually going on here? American writer Ethan Watters’s recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind.

This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing.

In Britain, where the psychoanalytical approach never got such a hold on popular culture, this expectation is much rarer—and so are the symptoms of PTSD.

Now, I seem to remember some EC comics from the 1950's (you can find reprints of these things if you look) with titles like "Frontline Combat" that had all sorts of stories about GI's going bonkers in combat--mostly they seem to be Korean War stories--that seems to agree with the first paragraph above.

Maybe the saying is right: It's all in your head.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Secret Ballot

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Secret Ballot

Fresh on the heels of its lawsuit against Boeing for attempting to locate a new plant in a state where it can commit the crime of running a profit, the NLRB now says it plans to sue the states of Arizona and South Dakota for passing state constitutional amendments requiring a secret ballot for unionizing a company.

The two targeted states argue there is no federal pre-emption of state law in this instance, because the federal labor statute doesn't prohibit secret ballot elections. The NLRB counter-argues that "Congress did not condition [the] fundamental right [to unionize] on the employees' manifesting their choice in a secret ballot election." It also explains that it is unfair to place employers "under direct state law pressure to refuse to recognize – or withdraw recognition from – their employees’ choice of a bargaining representative if that representative has not been designated in a secret ballot election." Yeah, I don't think that possibility is bothering many employers, but thanks for watching out for us!

Arizona and South Dakota aren't the only potential targets. While they passed their constitutional amendments by 61% and 79% votes respectively, voters in South Carolina and Utah passed similar constitutional amendments by 86% and 60% popular votes. The NLRB explained that it is not pursuing immediate lawsuits against the two additional states because it "doesn't have enough staff to handle four lawsuits at the same time." That confession suggests an immediate counter-strategy to this litigator.

The long-term counter-strategy, of course, is scheduled for November 2012.

Just Don't Let Them in the Foxholes

Just Don't Let Them in the Foxholes

What better way to establish that a certain type of militant secular humanism is just another evangelical religion? Atheists seek chaplain roles in military.

Be careful what you wish for, kiddies.

The Invisible Hand

The Invisible Hand

For years I read about the bloated public sector, without often encountering any effective measures for curbing it. Finally a handful of states and municipalities are doing the unthinkable: cutting their budgets. The response is a general rush for the door:

California is one of many states seeing double-digit increases in retirement applications from public employees like Essex. States across the U.S. are grappling with budget deficits totaling more than $540 billion since 2009, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and many legislatures have passed or are considering bills that would cut the pay of public workers, raise the amount they contribute to their benefits, or require furloughs. . . .

Because of the recession, many workers postponed retirement in 2008 and 2009. That and demographics explain some of the recent increase in retirements. Politics is also a factor, as budget-tightening officials take on the unions they say are driving up costs. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has likened his state's teachers union to "political thugs." Retirements there jumped 60 percent between 2009 and 2010. In Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker has signed a law limiting collective-bargaining rights, retirements are up 79 percent in the first quarter of 2011 over the same period last year. . . .

Impending pay and benefit cuts prompt others to quit. Florida Governor Rick Scott has proposed that workers pay 5 percent of their salaries to help cover pension contributions and health-insurance premiums as the state tries to trim a $3.8 billion deficit this year. Florida's retirement numbers are already 23 percent higher in the first seven months of the 2011 fiscal year than in all of 2010. Texas legislators may require state employees to pay for 10 percent of their health-insurance premiums, and the state expects retirements to climb 54 percent this fiscal year over last. . . .

The bottom line: Many states are seeing double-digit increases in retirement applications as legislators trim pay and benefits.

I see this as a good thing: people responding appropriately to price signals that reflect reality. The state workers' skills aren't being lost to society, only to the public sector. The ones who are doing work that their neighbors value will find work in the private sector. That way, the people who want the skills will be the ones who pay for them at a market rate, instead of passing their cost onto others. Nurses can be expected to fare better than bureaucrats. In the meantime, the public sector can get back to hiring only as many workers as the citizens are willing to support with taxes.

Delhi to Dublin.

I was sort of wondering when I'd finally see something like this...

Triumph O'er the Grave

Triumph O'er the Grave

Every year during Lent the liturgy calls for us to omit the usual "Alleluias" from our responses at several points in the service. It takes an effort of will not to add them at their accustomed places; it reminds us of the dark struggle we are commemorating. At last comes Easter. The joy and relief of the returning "Alleluia" at this season is very powerful.

These two triumphant numbers are so well known among Sacred Harpers that no one gets his part mixed up, and half of the singers don't need their books any more. The "Easter Anthem" being a little longer and involved than most Sacred Harp songs, the group in this particular video took the unusual step have having two leaders in the hollow square. (No, we don't sing this kind of music at my church -- I wish!)

Happy Easter to you all.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter:

Wealth & Civilization

Wealth & Civilization:

A new book by professor John Armstrong challenges the idea that wealth is bad.

Armstrong’s teachings are refreshing because high thinking has traditionally been hostile to money. Following Socrates, the philosophers of ancient Greece resolutely separated the things of this world from the welfare of the soul. The Stoics considered material goods irrelevant to the good life, while the Epicureans (despite their reputation) regarded piled possessions as a positive hindrance to the ataraxia, life without disagreeable sensation, which they sought. Cynic—“Dog”—philosophers sometimes pursued a pure asceticism: Diogenes the Cynic lived on the street in a giant pot, and (the story goes), when asked by the stooping Alexander the Great what gift he would like to receive, retorted, “Just stop blocking the sun!”

Come Christianity, the narrow eye of heaven’s needle always threatened the camel of wealth. As the new religion spread in the Roman world and had in practice to accommodate wealthy parishioners and plump prelates, nevertheless its theology shifted little in favor of Mammon. Even the globular Christian grandees of late Rome and Constantinople, whose shining silks hurt the eye and whose countless rings bent the hands that bore them—even they idolized filthy hermits babbling in the desert[.]

I wonder if Professor Armstrong indeed read the Greeks in the way that his reviewer suggests. It's always dangerous to assert that someone is 'following Socrates,' who famously asserted that he had nothing to teach; although now and then he would raise and defend propositions, it was never clear if he was doing so in earnest or for the joy of exploring the idea.

Aristotle, however, is very clear on the positive effects (as well as the moral hazards) associated with wealth. The good life becomes possible, Aristotle says in the Politics, only once the bare necessities of life have been arranged. This is true for the individual and for the wider civilization. The problem comes only if you lose sight of your objective: that is, if you stop trying to obtain sufficient wealth for the good life, and find yourself simply trying to obtain wealth.

The man without wealth cannot live well, though, because he must be driven by necessity rather than by virtue. Too, some virtues -- such as liberality and generosity -- cannot be practiced without disposable wealth.

I trust that Professor Armstrong is aware of all this, and the reviewer simply failed to mention it. These ideas are not so very new, or radical, as the review suggests: even the monastics, devoted to a very spiritual idea of the good life, nevertheless invested a great deal of labor into the production of material wealth. The monastic cell may be small and spare, but it was meant to be clean and well-kept; and the fasts were to be mixed with feasts.

A Late Easter

A Late Easter

Since the Counsel of Nicaea met in 325 A.D. to resolve a number of disputes in the early Christian Church, the "moveable feast" of Easter in the Western Christian tradition has been reckoned as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This computation is modified slightly by a couple of simplifying conventions: the vernal equinox is taken as fixed on March 21, while the date of the full moon for ecclesiastical purposes may vary slightly from the astronomical date.

In any case, the result is that Gregorian Easter can fall anywhere from March 22 to April 25. In years like 2011, when one full moon appears shortly before the equinox (March 19), and the next full moon appears on a Monday, Easter comes very late: in this case, only one day before the last possible date. The last time Easter fell on the earliest possible date, March 22, was 1818, a performance that will not be repeated until the year 2285. The last time it fell on the latest possible date, April 25, was 1943; it will not do so again until 2038.

Holidays fixed by solar and lunar cycles always link me in my imagination to ancestors who began watching the skies, noting the patterns, teaching them to their descendants, and working out simple rules that could predict such complex behavior. The fact that we should be able to perceive order around us is the central mystery of my life.

Unknown Voices

Unknown Voices

I don't know who this singer/player is, but my sister just sent me a link to her rendition of "The Blackest Crow" on YouTube. I sure like how anyone can upload a performance from her living room and make it accessible to anyone in the world who likes that kind of music. It combines the best part of amateur, personal music with the easy transmission of recorded music.

This performer also does an amazing job with an instrumental rendition of the music from "The Last of the Mohicans." I didn't know it was possible to get that kind of effect out of a dulcimer.

Good Friday

Good Friday:

As seen by CamoJack.

The Naturalist's Easter

The Naturalist's Easter (h/t Maggie's Farm)

The Secular Grail

The Secular Grail

Whenever I read stories like the one about "Spring Spheres" that I mentioned yesterday, or the Cult of the Pre-Patriarchal Goddess, or today's Dailer Caller article about environmentalists urging Christians and non-Christians alike to take advantage of this Sunday to celebrate "Earth Day," I reflect on how difficult it is for even for steadfastly modern, "rational," and secular human beings to be resolutely materialist. It seems that if you cut most people off from their society's traditional religion for even a short while, they revert to some kind of deism or paganism.

Don't get me wrong. A reverence for the natural world is among my strongest passions, felt so strongly that it can easily overwhelm my concern for other people, if left to itself. In general I haven't the least problem with Earth Day or even some of the more radical varieties of environmentalism. But I don't think the Easter Sunday pulpit ought to be given over to a homily on global warming. For one thing, of course, I'm unconvinced that global warming, even assuming we've identified a trend that's more than noise in the signal when viewed over millennia, is anthropogenic at all. The pulpit is no place to be expounding a contested scientific theory that will arouse divisive political passions.

What's more important, though, is that -- even if we had the perfect solution to an incontestable AGW theory in our hands -- Easter is a peculiarly inappropriate time to be indulging in fantasies about remaking the Earth into a perpetual Paradise. We can resolve not to do anything unnecessary to foul the Earth, but it is not at any time going to be converted into a place where we will find what we seek in Heaven. Earth is a place where we can find a great deal of natural pleasure, where we can meet our physical needs, and where we can do our duty. It is not a place where our souls can find their destiny. It's a creature, like us, and not something to be worshipped in its own right.

Easter is a time to reflect on what's going on besides the natural Earth around us. It's a time to grapple with Death and what might overcome it (which, in the natural world, is absolutely nothing). If those reflections send us back into our daily lives determined not to behave like self-obsessed littering ignoramuses with the beautiful natural bounty that has been bestowed on us, that's great. But that's a sideshow, not the main event. The source for virtues that will help us live better on the Earth is not in the Earth.

The Bells Have Flown

The Bells Have Flown:

Here is a comparative reading on the hours in Gethsemane.

Belief and Skepticism

Belief and Skepticism

My contribution to Holy Week here at the Hall is a link to a couple of related posts at Brandywine Books, one from "Phil" and the other from Hall regular Lars Walker. Phil links to a Wall Street Journal article by a former atheist who found that his skepticism wouldn't hold up to a dispassionate review of the evidence for the Resurrection, prompted by his wife's sudden conversion and his own responding discomfort. Commenters were pretty unhappy about it.

Lars links to an article by Peter Wood in the Chronicles of Higher Education, pointing out how differently academia views suspension of disbelief in spiritual matters, depending on whether the spirituality in question is that scary, unfashionable Christianity stuff, or the virtuous belief in a "great prehistoric cult of the Goddess in Europe connected to matriarchal rule":

The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life.

Finally, what Holy Week blogpost would be complete without a nod to the recent story of a 16-year-old who told her Seattle radio station that she was forbidden to bring easter eggs to school for her community service project unless she agreed to call them "spring spheres." This story may turn out to be as mythical as the Sphere Bunny; either that, or it's so embarrassing that a Seattle school board spokesperson claims the district's efforts to look into the incident have failed to turn up anyone willing to admit they said any such thing. That's actually encouraging, in a twisted way. But I have to admit that the 16-year-old's circumstantial and detailed account, as reported by the radio station, has more of the ring of truth to it than the school's bland denials.

You Can Never Leave

You Can Never Leave

You can always tell a socialist society by which direction they point the guns at the border.

The National Labor Relations Board has just asked an administrative judge to tell Boeing it must not begin production of new jets at its new facilities in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, because the relocation of this part of Boeing's business is an unlawful retaliation against its Seattle machinists union for past strikes.

The union has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989. Per the Wall Street Journal's take on this situation today, a 58-day strike in 2008 cost the company $1.8 billion. Talks with the union about leaving the work in Washington State bogged down over the union's demand for a seat on the board and a pledge that all future jets would be built in Puget Sound. Now Boeing has nearly completed construction of its $2 billion South Carolina plant; a thousand employees already have relocated there. Describing the motive for the relocation in an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, a Boeing executive said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.” From this, the union concluded that “Boeing’s decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights.” What's more, according to the complaint filed, the decision to move had the effect of “discouraging membership in a labor organization” and thus violates federal law.

It's obvious to me that Boeing workers will suffer financial harm and discouragement for exercising their collective bargaining rights in the way they have done historically. It's probably even fair to say that Boeing's proposed move to South Carolina will bring the nature of that financial harm into sharp focus for them, thus discouraging them further. I'd go so far as to guess that some of the squintier-eyed Boeing bigwigs are experiencing a certain amount of schadenfreude. So does it follow that Boeing's move is an unlawful retaliation for past strikes? Or is the union simply being mugged by the reality that an employer won't want to work in the union's state any more if the employer keeps losing money to work stoppages every few years? If union members are feeling discouraged about the benefits of union membership, why exactly is that? It's not as though Boeing were setting fire to the houses of the most troublesome unions reps. All Boeing is doing is removing its own hateful presence. Which is wrong. Come back here, dang it.

As the WSJ puts it: "Ultimately, the NLRB seems to be resting its complaint on the belief that Boeing spent nearly $2 billion out of spite, which sounds less like a matter of law than of campaign 2012 politics."

The most puzzling line in the NY Times report may be the statement of the NLRB's acting general counsel that "he was not seeking to close the South Carolina factory or prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there." So what is it he's after again, then? Maybe he'd like Boeing to go ahead and make money in South Carolina, then let the union in Puget Sound have a "taste" of the resulting profits?

I think Boeing has no choice but to file a counter-complaint alleging that the NLRB's action "discourages" state legislatures from passing right-to-work laws, and that therefore the administrative lawsuit must be enjoined on Constitutional grounds.

H/T Hot Air and The Daily Caller.

A better article

A Better Article on the Bible:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a perspective on the beauty to be found in plurality.

In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do.

Anyone who has ever attended a Catholic mass has encountered the readings from Scripture; after the first two readings, in the masses I have attended, the reader underlines that the scripture is the word of God. I suspect this is the cause of much of the confusion.

If the reading were of one of the visions of God -- say, Ezekiel's -- this 'word of God' is really the word of the prophet: no one is really contesting the point (except the 'debunkers,' who may contest that there was a prophet at all). The same Church has endorsed St. Thomas Aquinas' view, however, that God is simple: He has no parts. Thus, the vision of the prophet speaks of the hand of God, but God has no hand: God has no parts.

The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! 5 This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’”

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

What does the Church mean, to endorse both claims? Something other than what many have taken them to mean, I suspect: but something very serious, all the same.

Holy Week

Holy Week:

We are now well into Holy Week, and I have failed to make any decent note of it here. As penance I shall try to read yet another rendition of the tired, empty gripes against religion published this week by the Washington Post.

OK, I've tried three times. Lunacy... reactionary... abortion is a natural right!... Leviticus... religion lies, lies, lies!

Great. Did you ever see the point of the thing, though? Did you ever understand what was at the root of the mystery that religion tries to approach? Failing that, there's no point talking about it with you. You're missing some essential human element; a rant like this should occasion the deepest pity for the author.

Fish

Fish and Potatoes:

A song in Norsk.



Vikings! Fish and potatoes are fine, but wasn't it more fun when you were plundering monasteries? Just let me add that public sector unions are the ones with all the golden idols, these days.

H/t: BSBfB.

We're From the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

We're from the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

The FDIC released a report today with the amazing claim that, if the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act had been in place in 2008, the FDIC could have prevented the multi-hundred-billion-dollar international Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and saved creditors billions of dollars without costing taxpayers a red cent.

The Lehman bankruptcy was an amazing lawyer-fest, with a whopping $1.2 billion in fees approved by the bankruptcy court to be paid out of the bankruptcy estate's assets. It ending up paying creditors only 21 cents on the dollar. The FDIC claims it could have paid creditors 97 cents on the dollar. One way it would have accomplished this public service is to avoid all the legal fees. That much I probably buy; many of the legal battles would not have been fought at all absent the special bankruptcy context.

The FDIC says it also would have helped things by making its own loan to Lehman for operating funds, thus eliminating Lehman's need to negotiate for debtor-in-possession financing in bankruptcy. I'm not entirely convinced by the FDIC's claim that Lehman would and could have repaid this loan without burdening taxpayers, but OK, maybe.

I'm less convinced about this:

Under Dodd-Frank, the FDIC can require that systemically important investment banks, insurance companies and other companies with large financial services components deemed vital to the global financial system have resolution plans.

Such a “living will” would have required Lehman Brothers to develop early on a plan to dump or restructure some of its toxic real estate and private equity investments before being placed under FDIC receivership. The FDIC and other regulators both inside and outside the U.S. would also have had the ability to study Lehman's living will and work to improve it.

I don't like contemplating the image of FDIC regulators "studying" Lehman's "living will" in order to "work and improve it" -- either quickly, cheaply, or effectively. I doubt they could have been made to understand Lehman's business at all. Then there's this:

One of the key benefits to FDIC resolution authority is the potential speed of the transaction. Title II of Dodd-Frank allows the FDIC to review a financial institution's books, identify a potential buyer and any troubled assets that need to be split off, and quietly conduct bidding prior to taking over as a receiver.

The FDIC does have a track record of pulling off these emergency prebankruptcy sales at great speed, but as you might expect, when the pressure's on, the government regulators get their shirts handed to them. Invariably they find out in a year or two that they cut a horrible deal and some evil capitalist made a lot more money than they intended to allow, and they complain about it loudly -- often suing to renegotiate the deal.

This one, for me, is the real howler:

One of the problems Lehman faced as it skidded into bankruptcy was that potential buyers, including Barclays and Bank of America Corp., identified between $50 billion and $70 billion in assets they did not want to touch. Lehman was in no position to bargain, so the buyers walked, necessitating the bankruptcy filing, according to the report. . . . FDIC receivership would have prevented that, the report said.

As far as I can tell, this just means that the FDIC would have strong-armed some favor-currying insured bank into accepting the toxic assets, which would have ended up some day as a drain on the FDIC insurance system.

WE'RE DELIGHTED BY THE UNEXPECTED

Or at least I am delighted by finding synchronicity where I least expected it:

“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

[snip]

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

What the NYT article calls "those goose bump moments" - it describes the reaction I've always had to the Bard:

... how is poetic language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:

An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

As Davis's experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these "syntactic violations," the brain accepts them, and is excited by the "grammatical oddities" it is experiencing. While it has not been fully proven that we can localize which parts of the brain process nouns as opposed to verbs, Davis says his research suggests that "in the moment of hesitation" brought on by the stimulative effects of functional shift, the brain doesn't know "what part to assign the word to."

... we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

It even explains the magic of a baby's laughter.

Maybe it explains why I so often prefer the company of friends who have the grace to disagree with me. Who knows?

Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful.

My Brain Hurts

My Brain Hurts

You'll think me mad, but I've allowed myself once more to be drawn into an economic discussion with a "Modern Monetary Theory" enthusiast, because I was so startled to read that a solid bunch of progressives out there believe that the government deficit is not only a good but an essential thing for the welfare and happiness of Americans.

First of all, I've got to link to last year's Onion video on "The Money Hole" (h/t to today's Daily Caller for reposting it), which perfectly captures the lunacy of most political/economic discussions I've ever tried to listen to:

Now back to MMT: I take it the idea is that all private-sector financial transactions balance out to zero, which is Bad Thing, so the Government/Treasury/Central Bank injects new net financial transactions into the economy by spending more than the government taxes, which is a Good Thing. I asked why, in that case, the government shouldn't make the deficit even more fabulously beneficent by spending with greater abandon and collecting no taxes at all. The answer came back that that would cause inflation, a Bad Thing. What's more, without taxes, there would be no demand for the U.S. currency, because no one would believe it had value, just as my personal I.O.U. has no value if I have no visible means of future support. So why is a deficit a Good Thing, again?

And why is it not a Good Thing that all private-sector financial transactions net out to zero? Isn't that another way of saying that part of the private sector (say, older people who've amassed assets for retirement) is always lending to another part of the private sector (say, younger people who are starting businesses)? Why shouldn't it balance? And what, in the name of all that's comprehensible, would any of this have to do with the dream of full employment provided to us by a benevolent government?

I've never been schooled properly in economics. It was one of those things I never even considered studying in college. Now I'm completely at sea, trying to read up on this stuff. Can someone tell me whether MMT is complete lunacy, or is it worth trying to read more about it until I can make sense of some of the concepts? Because reading some of the links I've been sent to really makes me feel like I'm trying to understand the works of Joseph Smith, but without bringing sufficient faith to the task.

My husband recommended Thomas Sowell's excellent text, Basic Economics, to make up for my inadequate formal education, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly, because it's written in something I recognize as English. In the meantime, I see S&P has "revised its outlook" on the U.S. sovereign credit rating, perhaps preparatory to downgrading its AAA status:

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.

Preferences in Culture

Preferences in Culture

I have no idea how to explain the seeming decline in culture that Grim has posted about, except for my persistent suspicion that it has more to do than I would like with my tastes having been cemented in early adulthood. I become more of a curmudgeon with every passing decade. I do think it's interesting to look at differences in opinion between lay readers and "expert" readers in compiling a "100 Best Novels" list, in this case one compiled by the Modern Library.

The expert list places a higher value on craft and the sophistication of ideas, while the popular list rewards sheer entertainment value. It pains me to admit that I am familiar with many titles on the expert list only because I've seen movie versions (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Wings of a Dove, The Golden Bowl, Deliverance, The Maltese Falcon, A High Wind in Jamaica, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie's Choice, The Sheltering Sky, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ragtime). Others I've read only because they were assigned to me, but found that they'll never be for me: any James Joyce, for instance, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But there's a solid core of titles I agree with: Lolita, the Forster works, the Faulkner works.

The readers'-choice list is heavy on Ayn Rand and other speculative or ideological works such as science fiction. It includes some of my pulp favorites: books I actually like well enough to re-read, even if I would never try to defend my choice on purely literary grounds to a discriminating reader. Yes, I confess, I enjoyed both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" and I've at least read all of the several additional Rand entries. No, I won't try to defend the awful writing; I don't care. L. Ron Hubbard (three entries! Yikes!) and Frank Herbert and Lovecraft, not to mention Cormac McCarthy, will never be my cup of tea, but this list contains no fewer than six of my favorite Heinlein yarns, each of which I've re-read till the covers came apart. I was also happy to see some of my favorite Faulkner works on both this and the expert list. But who is this Charles de Lint guy, with eight winners? He's not even remotely familiar to me.

Reading lists like this always tempt me to go over to Amazon and order a bunch of stuff. Since I just did that last week with a pile of books about economics and social science that are still lying around in an accusing pile, I guess I'll have to defer my gratification. But I will put in a plug here for a recent fiction purchase, an early Patrick O'Brian coming-of-age romp called "The Road to Samarcand," the adventures of an orphaned young man traveling on the Silk Road in the 1930s with his adventurous, worldly-wise uncle and a scholarly dingbat of a cousin. (Hey, where's O'Brian on the popular list?)

In the meantime, I want to hear from all of you about all the books on these lists that I haven't read but should.

Chivalry & the French Revolution

Chivalry & the French Revolution:

One of the periodic articles about the alleged death of chivalry has garnered a strange reply from Stacy McCain. The reply is more interesting than the original post, which is well-traveled ground for us.

What Burke denounced as a “barbarous philosophy” was the spirit of modern radicalism — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — that rejects all tradition and custom as oppressive superstition. The mob that invaded Versailles in October 1789, insulting the Queen whose honor Burke thought should be avenged by “ten thousand swords,” was acting in accordance with this radical “scheme of things,” wherein “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman [and] a woman is but an animal.”

If you want to know how to restore chivalry, you must forget the idea that chivalry is about manners. It is about sacrifice. The problem with this analysis is that it neglects the degree to which Marie Antoinette was always treated like an animal: a sacrificial animal. Let me quote here from Robert Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch, page 70-2.

Marie Antoinette... entered Strasbourg as a fourteen-year-old fiancee in a crystal coach.... On an island in the middle of the Rhine, the masters of ceremony had chosen the place where the archduchess was to be handed over, naked, to her husband's envoys. A special pavilion, in rooms decorated with tributes to the future queen, had been built to receive her.

...

On an island washed by the currents of the Rhine, a wooden pavilion had been erected: "the house of the consignment." There, Maria Antonietta, as she had been called in childhood, became forever Marie Antoinette. The consignment took place on an international border, which ran down the middle of the pavilion and through the great table in the center of the main hall. Marie Antoinette entered the pavilion from the Austrian side. In the last room before the border she was slowly undressed before the escort that had accompanied her from Vienna. Not even a ribbon or a hairpin was to remain in contact with her body. She was thus offered, naked, to fabrics woven in the new French land -- to the silk shift, the stockings from Lyon, the little slippers fashioned by the Court's shoemaker....

[T]he passage through ritual death was noted by the many eyes that were observing her and that would continue to observe her until her biological death. This act of sacrificial stripping effected her complete transfer to the land that was clothing her with destiny. Protocol is the last power for protecting abandoned symbols. It ensures that symbols, even when they are not perceived as such, can continue to act[.]

The French Revolution meant to tear down old symbols, but -- this seems to be Calasso's key thesis -- all it achieved by abandoning the rituals was to restore the blood to what long ago had become symbolic sacrifices. The ancient order raises its head once the rituals that placated it have been abandoned.

The archaeologist P.V. Glob believed that these were "offerings to the gods of fertility and good fortune"...

Many bog bodies show signs of being stabbed, bludgeoned, hanged or strangled, or a combination of these methods. In some cases the individual had been beheaded, and in the case of the Osterby Head found at Kohlmoor, near to Osterby, Germany in 1948, the head had been deposited in the bog without its body.

Usually the corpses were naked, sometimes with some items of clothing with them, particularly headgear. In a number of cases, twigs, sticks or stones were placed on top of the body, sometimes in a cross formation, and at other times forked sticks had been driven into the peat to hold the corpse down. According to the archaeologist P.V. Glob, "this probably indicates the wish to pin the dead man firmly into the bog." Some bodies show signs of torture, such as Old Croghan Man, who had deep cuts beneath his nipples.

Some bog bodies, such as Tollund Man from Denmark, have been found with the rope used to strangle them still around their necks. Some, such as the Yde Girl in the Netherlands and bog bodies in Ireland, had the hair on one side of their heads closely cropped, although this could be due to one side of their head being exposed to oxygen for a longer period of time than the other. The bog bodies seem consistently to have been members of the upper class: their fingernails are manicured, and tests on hair protein routinely record good nutrition.

The Catholic churches burned in the French Revolution had been the halls of sacrifice, where now only one victim was sacrificed: and when they drank his blood and ate his flesh, he was satisfied. Yet in the ancient order, the old order and the new one, there was always sacrifice.

All honor comes from sacrifice. Honor is sacrifice: and therefore the greatest honor is for the one who stands up and offers to be the sacrifice. This is why we honor those who put on the uniform of our military, which is nothing less than an offer to go forward into the ritual of sacrifice so that the rest of us do not have to do so. In this they are doing just as Jesus is said to have done for all mankind; as Beowulf did for Hrothgar.

It is important to realize exactly why the queen was not just a woman, and not just an animal. It is important to realize why the queen, above all, deserved ten thousand swords. She was the sacrifice. She was the royal child sacrificed by Austria to France after the Seven Years War, given over in ritual death so that other children would not have to be given over to war.

It is not for no reason that the words "sacrifice" and "sacred" are so closely linked. This was the order that the Revolution broke, and the reason the streets of Paris ran red with blood.

Infants Behind the Wheel

Infants Behind the Wheel

H/t Zero Hedge

An angry rant about taxes. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

via Instapundit

How to Meet Nice Guys

How to Meet Nice Guys

It's an old problem: where to go, what to do, to meet nice fellows you might want to date and even, some day, marry. For gently raised young women of prior centuries, the task might have been entirely handled by her family. Modern young women demanded the right to do their own screening and picking. Sometimes that meant choosing from among lifelong acquaintances from the neighborhood. Sometimes it meant meeting young men at church, or school, or (eventually) at work. These days, who has time? Who goes to church? Who stays in touch with the old neighborhood, or listens to what one's family thinks about a prospective date?

But anonymous hookups are so dispiriting, not to mention how many of them peter out after a one-night stand, or become outright dangerous. Along came Match.com, where you could be introduced to a guy who had filled out a form, and you could trust him enough to be alone with him after only a few hours, without knowing anything about his family, his history, or his character! Except, of course, that Match.com is a lot better at fostering introductions than about vetting your prospective paramour. The company has now been sued by a woman who is shocked to discover that a stranger is still a stranger. A guy she met through Match.com followed her home after the second date and assaulted her. Now she wants a judge to shut the company down until it institutes an effective mechanism for screening out sexual predators.

Maybe Match.com will have to start attending church with its male members and getting to know their families and friends. And it can have a special division that roughs the guy up if he doesn't live up to his reputation as a gentleman.

The Joys of Urbanism

The Joys of Urbanism

Here's how big a city containing the entire world population of 6.9 billion would have to be if it were the same density as some of the world's cities:

Paris:

New York:

Singapore:

San Francisco:

London:

Houston:

Most of you are idiots

Most of You are Idiots with Nothing to Say:

Present company excepted, of course. However, that is the conclusion of two separate articles treating the bounty of literature being published today.

Why read?

If we take the argument a step further, we face the possibility that the humanities are actually countereconomic; the notion of alterity and sympathy, taken seriously, would undo the profit motive and put a fair amount of grit into the workings of economic activity. It would undermine the individualism upon which exchange, in its current forms, is based.

Why write?

A loud, swarming noise of hundreds of thousands of books published each year, one almost indistinguishable from the next. Here are three new biographies of Coco Chanel, published almost simultaneously. A giant stack of memoirs about being sexually abused as a child. A dozen or so fantasy trilogies that begin with a poor girl who, upon the death of her mother, discovers she’s actually heir to the throne and must fight off usurpers.

Surely, though, the best ideas float to the top?

Does one dare to raise one’s voice above the commotion, try to draw some attention away from those taking up the spotlight? Who gets in that rarefied space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.

That's from a female author, by the way.

We've occasionally discussed the problem -- usually in the context of music -- of "Where are our Wagners?" Eric reminds us that we are in a time of extraordinary richness of sharing: we can hear forms of music that most of the greats never heard while they were composing; and those great composers; and many other forms as well.

This should be producing some magnificent synthesis, Beethoven with punk rock: but what we're getting instead is... well, it's garbage. Literature and academic thought is likewise drowning in sewage.

What is to be done about this? Also, what does it mean that more variety -- even more access to the greatest that history has ever produced -- does not reliably produce greats, but seems instead to drown them? I have heard that happiness is often imperiled by having too many choices; this seems like another problem of that type.

It is a problem not often considered in philosophy, which often follows Aristotle's formula that 'the good' is what things desire, and they desire those things because they lack them in some sense. Here is a case where we lack nothing -- not the best. Yet, lacking nothing, we are unable to make good things ourselves. It is as if the magic has broken, and the spell receded: all that is left are the old things, the works we cannot make alone.

A Solution to Global Warming

A Solution to Global Warming

According to the San Francisco Business Times, marijuana grown indoors is responsible for 1% of U.S. electrical production and contributes 17 million metric tons of carbon per year, not counting exhalations.

A couple of years ago, I spent a little over a year representing the bankrupt owners of a large redwood timber company in Humboldt County, California. The few local towns are tiny. They used to depend almost entirely on the timber industry, before it was ripped to shreds. More recently, the local economy has given the superficial impression of depending on tourism (it's an extremely beautiful, remote area), but it's widely believed that the actual source of income buoying the place up is grow-houses. Locals believe that most of the rental house stock is in use as indoor pot farms. A very small town supports two fully-stocked hydroponics-supply stores.

The S.F. Business Times asserts that, after medical marijuana was legalized in 1996, residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50% in comparison with other parts of California. One of the issues complicating my bankruptcy case was the presence of squatters in the redwood forests, who grew pot in the clearings and had a distressing tendency to start small brush wars in response to intruders. Paradise, man! Global warming probably will make the pot crop even more vigorous.