Tropical Storm Promise

Tropical Storm Promise

We're under what I like to think of as a tentative promise of a tropical storm. We've had only 8 inches of rain in 2011, half of which was in January. The storm track models keep aiming Tropical Storm Don just to our south, which would put us in the wet northeastern quarter, the sweet spot. It's not a very big storm; even in the small center, winds probably will be only about 60 mph. That means that if it misses us by much, we won't even get much rain.

It's sure to dump some rain on someone in Texas, though, and the whole state needs it desperately. This time of year, just about the form we're likely to get rain in is a tropical storm or hurricane. We're grateful to have a small one headed our way: all rain and no evacuation or storm shutters, just the way we like 'em.

Two Weeks

Countdown:

Two weeks from today I should be headed back to the Hall from the "undisclosed location" that has taken up the last few months of my life. I'll be sure to wear a helmet... at least part of the way.

Phoenix Claws

Phoenix Claws

Our neighbors started up a small-scale chicken operation this spring. Earlier this week, it was time to slaughter the excess 3-month-old roosters, who were starting to fight. Max, the man of the household, was kind enough to catch up the roosters one by one, put them in the killing cone, and cut their throats. His wife and I then plucked and cleaned them with the aid and technical advice of his mom, for whom this was a common task earlier in her life. We're lucky to have her experience to draw on. I'm afraid our speed wasn't up to what we'd been reading about: 4-1/2 seconds to pluck one bird! We tentatively learned how to scald and pluck and gut the birds, spending the better part of three hours to get nine of them all done and on ice. But we'll get faster now that we've got the hang of it.

My neighbors didn't want the feet, so I took them home and boiled them down into stock. My husband recommends getting the heads next time, too, but I'm going to have to work up to that gradually. The feet I thought I was equal to. It turns out they make a very fine stock, being so rich in cartilage. This picture isn't of my own stock, but it looks the same: as firm as Jello once it cools. I got a solid gallon of rich stock out of 30 feet (they did six more chickens after I left). I had taken home a rooster the first night, which my husband obligingly roasted, and then I made up a nice batch of chicken and dumplings with the leftover roast chicken and half of the stock the next day. I used my East Texas aunt's housekeeper's simple dumpling recipe, which produces a pasta-noodle style of dumpling rather than the biscuit-drop variety:

1/2 cup Crisco or lard, melted in
1/2 cup hot water
1/2 t salt
2 cups flour
1 egg

Whip up the melted shortening and hot water until creamy, then beat in the egg until fluffy. Stir in the flour to incorporate, then roll it out to 1/8-inch thick on a floured surface. Let it rest a few minutes, then slice it up into bite-sized pieces and drop them into the boiling chicken soup, leaving them to cook until you like the texture of the cooked dumplings (a few minutes, depending on how thin you got them).

I took half of the finished dish back over to Max and Marydell. I revealed the chicken-foot origins of the stock to her, but she didn't choose to tell Max. Today I mentioned it to him and got the expected ewwww response. What the heck: I strained out the toenails, didn't I? And he'd already admitted how delicious it was. Wait till I make up a batch with the heads.

Asian cultures prize the chicken feet in all kinds of dishes. The Chinese, I understand, call them "phoenix claws." In my household, the stock is for us and the dogs get to eat the de-boned discarded solids, as they always do when I make stock.

NYT Argument against interest

"The Left-Leaning Tower"

Give it up, would-be conservative academics, argues the New York Times:

Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”...

If you were a conservative undergraduate, would you risk spending at least four years in graduate school in the hope of getting a job offer from a committee dominated by people who don’t share your views?

You might well select another career for yourself — but you wouldn’t exactly call it self-selection.

There is at least some chance that academia might choose you precisely because you don't share their views -- the virtue of diversity is, after all, supposed to be at the core of contemporary academic society. In theory, at least.

Hanging Tree

Hanging Tree:

Variations on a theme.

NEH on REL

The National Endowment for Humanities on Robert E. Lee:

The NEH continues its assault on Robert E. Lee. The piece is worth reading, I suppose, in that it shows how little they are able to muster themselves to the work. The most they can really do is convict a faction of historians; the truth is, they have almost nothing to say against General Lee himself.

To answer the question they ask -- how could a man like this have become a national hero? -- res ipsa loquitur. The trauma of the war turned many hands, and even good hands, to evil work; but the General seems to have kept his faith, and done so well that even his enemies could only praise him. It is right and proper to honor those who manage such hours so well.

Mercenaries

"Mercenaries"

Greyhawk has a piece on Hillary Clinton's Mercenary Army. As to which, I always think of the poem by A. E. Housman.

Epitaph on Army of Mercenaries (1914)
THESE, in the day when heaven was falling
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

That Iraq has been abandoned by God, I would not defend; but perhaps he has made provisions we might not have expected.

Charity and Goodwill

Charity, Women, and New Media:

Susannah Breslin writes a rather biting piece on women at blogging conferences. The most important part of the piece is on a tangent to its main point, so we'll treat that first.

For example, this month Love Drop is helping the Withrow family. Felicity Withrow is four. She was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. She has a brain tumor that is attached to her brain stem. On top of this, Felicity’s mother is pregnant. Love Drop is trying to raise $5,000 to help the Withrow family with Felicity’s radiation treatments. So far, they’ve raised $2,500, but they need to raise $2,500 more. It’s too bad Mountain Dew would rather give who knows how much to have some “young, cute chick” natter on about Mountain Dew than give $2,500 to the Withrow family to help their daughter not be sick.

Is that too bad? Mountain Dew probably helps many children not be sick, by providing jobs and health insurance to their parents; it may be that there is a greater good being worked than is obvious.

Nevertheless, watch the video.



It is a hard year for charity. We recently finished our Project VALOUR-IT fundraiser, and did not reach the goal in spite of strong last minute strides; and we are very tightly tied to those being helped. This charity has raised only half of what it meant to raise for the little girl, with barely a handful of days left in the month devoted to her.

The reasons for this are obvious: the weakness of the economy, the difficulty of predicting how much you will be able to spare from your own duties and needs. That is to say, it is the weakness of Mountain Dew -- of them and others like them -- that makes it so hard to raise these funds. If people could easily get such jobs, or felt secure in the ones they had, charity would not be so hard to find.

Ms. Breslin makes a larger point about the relative shallowness of female bloggers, but I think she may be pointing her weapon in the wrong direction. The problem isn't female bloggers, but panels about female bloggers. The few women who compete on even terms are as good as anyone; there just aren't as many. If you insist on having a panel about "women bloggers," then, you're going to get a lot of folks on that panel who aren't as interesting as the ones who run at the top.

This is akin to Raymond Chandler's point made in his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read.

We see much the same economy at work in the academy, where men outnumber women among the serious arts and sciences. It is not that the women who do well in those arts and sciences are less serious than the men; there just aren't as many of them. This seems to have to do with the fact that the IQ curve for women is less flat, meaning that there are fewer female idiots and fewer female geniuses. The average woman isn't less intelligent, less interesting or more self-absorbed than the average man; but the average man doesn't get featured on a panel. Because we are interested in showing that we are interested in women, the average (or slightly above average) woman does.

Take heart, then, Ms. Breslin.

"Dear Yankee"

"Dear Yankee"

Via HotAir, I found this Texas Monthly piece by a local journalist who, though obviously no fan of Governor Rick Perry, hasn't much patience with the establishment's usual attitude toward the state that has filled the White House for 17 of the last 48 years. Don't misunderestimate the man, he warns:

The first place you need to go to understand Perry is Paint Creek, where he grew up. Paint Creek is not a town. It’s a watercourse that runs through the cotton fields of southern Haskell County. Perry’s parents were tenant farmers, and not just tenant farmers but dryland farmers, which is as hard as farming gets. In a June 2010 interview with TEXAS MONTHLY editor Jake Silverstein, Perry described an incident involving a new couch that his parents, who “rarely ever bought anything,” had just purchased. “There were places in our house that you could see outside through the cracks by the windows,” the governor recalled, “and this dust storm came in and there was a layer of dust all over that new couch. And it just, you know, kind of—it was a hard life for them.” In the interview, Perry also described taking baths in the number two washtub and using an outhouse until his father built indoor plumbing in his early years. “We were rich,” Perry said, “but not in material things. I had miles and miles of pasture, a Shetland pony, and a dog. . . . I spent a lot of time just alone with my dog. A lot."

For someone who hasn't entered the race yet, Perry is polling amazingly well. It's such a confusing field. There's a huge groundswell of "anybody but Obama" sentiment that hasn't yet found a challenger to coalesce around. Perry has such high negatives that I was hoping someone else would float to the top; I really am not looking forward to another round of hick-bashing and cowboy jokes (and Aggie jokes, too, this time). But I can see how a multi-term governor with budget-balancing credentials might do very well despite the firestorm he can expect from the media. The man has a lot of hard bark on him. He's not yearning for adulation from the masses.

Heh. "There are monsters that need pummeling"

Templar my ass

Templars my @#$:

The attack in Norway apparently had a long-standing fantasy of belonging to a revived Knights Templar. Variations on this fantasy are not uncommon -- one meets lots of "Knights Templar" at Scottish Highland Games thanks to the York Rite -- but it's flatly outrageous to see someone laying claim to the organization who writes this:

Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man. I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe.

We see here a man of "logic" -- so he says -- who wants to dress himself in religious trappings, such as the robes of the Knights Templar and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard.

We keep saying that it's a shame there is no Pope of Islam to condemn these actors, and clarify that the religion does not endorse them. There certainly is a Pope of the Catholic Church, however, who has every right to clarify these matters. If you want to join one of the military orders, there still is one; although I am not sure how one goes about getting an invitation to join (more's the pity!). The Pope is the one who ought to be serving as our "gravity well" here. People worried about Islam overrunning Europe could be drawn into reinvigorating Christianity, and serving in better ways.

Where's the Middle Ground?

Where's the Middle Ground?

All the talk lately about how the powers that be must reach a compromise assumes that there's a middle ground to occupy. I suppose by definition there is, but the problem may be that it occurs in an area that's almost equally unthinkable for statist and small-government enthusiasts. As Don Quixote at Bookwoom Room puts it:

Conservatives want as little government as possible consistent with doing what government must do (internal & external security, some regulation, some useful programs (national highway system, for example)). Liberals want as much government as they can have without killing the golden goose.

The problem is that the two visions don’t intersect. The largest government any conservative worthy of the name could support would still be much smaller than the smallest government any liberal worthy of the name would support. . . .

The issue is not really whether we close the debt gap with tax increases and spending cuts. . . . The issue is what role we want government to play in our lives. Do we want only the government that is necessary? Or do we want all the government we can afford? Or do we want to maintain a government that we can’t afford, leaving our children to deal with the mess? . . . Even assuming that both sides in the current negotiations wish to change from that course (not at all a safe assumption!) they will not do so in anything more than a papered over way unless they can bridge the gap between the first two philosophies.

Mark Steyn weighs in on the demographic difficulty:

The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, then wonder why the shrunken rump of a "working" population in between can't make the math add up.

By the way, demographically speaking, these categories — "adolescents" and "retirees" — are an invention of our own time: They didn't exist a century ago. You were a kid till 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died.

As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran'ma recently that the August checks might not go out, funding nonproductivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state. Good luck with that at a time when every appliance in your home is manufactured in Asia.

CRS Debt

CRS On the Debt, Market Confidence:

Via FAS's Project on Government Secrecy, some Congressional Research products on the debt and market confidence, and the balanced budget amendment.

The CRS puts these things together to inform Congress who are thinking about issues of the day. It usually does a pretty good job at trying to inform without attempting to influence the debate. However, there's a danger that the CRS can sometimes set the left and right limits of debate in situations where (as sometimes is the case) a more emphatic solution is needed than is conventionally thought wise. On the other hand, sometimes it usefully clarifies that radical-sounding options are not as radical as they seem.

For example, section IV of the BBA piece considers the question of whether a Constitutional Convention might be forced by the states. The idea of the BBA is often treated by DC insiders as beyond the pale; the idea of a constitutional convention as being so radical as to be impossible to consider. Yet we are very close to seeing a state-forced convention on the BBA issue.

There is no question that a convention can be forced by the states, but there is a question about whether a state can rescind its request for a convention. (The history here has to do with the radification of the Reconstruction amendments, particularly the 14th, in which states were sometimes forced to rescind their votes and sometimes not permitted by Congress to do so -- depending on whether or not Congress liked how they had voted.) Depending on the outcome of that question, perhaps 32 states have voted to call the convention.

It takes 34 to force the convention. Radical or not, we're very close to it.

Chinese Pizza

Chinese Pizza:

"Slice" has a review of a fusion pizza attempt out of Queens, NY. They weren't terribly impressed, but the idea of Chinese meats on a pizza is one that I encountered to much better effect in Hangzhou, China.

We used to go to a place called the Reggae Cafe, which was a little bar and restaurant near Hangzhou Daxue decorated in what the locals took to be a Caribbean style. They had both Jamaican and Haitian music, actually, from pirated CDs of the type that were a major feature of the Hangzhou economy in those days.

Given the theme, they tended to stretch for anything Western. There was one grocery store in the city that managed to get a case of Guinness beer while we were there, which it proceeded to sell by the individual bottle at an extraordinary price (for China). I bought one for nostalgia, but the Reggae Cafe bought the rest; and then, when they had been drunk, decorated the bar by lining it with the expended bottles.

(Pity it wasn't Dragon Stout, which would have been more to the point! Pretty good beer, too, by comparison to the local swill. But I digress.)

They served what they called a Sichuan Pizza made with the spicy ingredients for which the province is so well known in America. I found it to be delicious; in fact, it was probably the reason I spent so much time at that little hole in the wall.

A little Google searching suggests to me that the "Reggae Cafe" still exists, and is now called "the Reggae Bar" -- having passed its "Reggae Cafe" name to much a much fancier offspring, to judge from the decor in those pictures. Good on them! No word on whether they still serve the pizza.

Heh.

Looking

Looking in the Right Places:

An editor of the Atlantic looks at the Thirty Years' War, and learns something important.

In sober fact, civilian prisoners were led off in halters to die of exposure by the wayside, children kidnapped and held to ransom, priests tied under the wagons to crawl on all fours like dogs until they dropped, burghers and peasants imprisoned, starved and tortured for their concealed wealth to the uttermost of human endurance with uttermost of human ingenuity....

At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing on the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in the whole Rhineland they watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food; at Zweibrucken a woman confessed to having eater her child.

He and I fundamentally agree about the conclusion he reaches from studying these facts, although perhaps little else; but what is more important to me is that he got there the right way.

Now comes the metaphysical question: what does it mean that the world is this way? Likewise the moral question: given that it is, and we are here, what is our duty?

And in other news....

From the Secretary of Defense:
Secretary Panetta’s Statement on Certification of Readiness to Implement Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

From the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

Adm. Mike Mullen's Statement on Certification of Readiness to Implement Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell

This Isn't Even a Right-Wing Push Poll

This Isn't Even a Right-Wing Push Poll

I'm easily discouraged by national polls. So I was shocked to my toes and pleased as punch to read at HotAir that a CNN poll shows decisive support from every single demographic and political persuasion in the United States for the "Cut, Cap & Balance" bill that our Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, calls the worst legislation in human history:

[A] consensus exists across all political lines that the CCB/BBA [Cut, Cap & Balance/Balanced Budget Amendment] approach would be a good idea. When one scrolls down to the crosstab sections of the raw data, the consensus becomes very, very clear. The CCB/BBA approach wins majorities in every single demographic — including self-described liberals. Sixty-three percent of Democrats back the House bill. The least supportive age demographic is 50-64YOs at 62/37; the least supportive regional demographic is the Midwest at 61/39. Even those who express opposition to the Tea Party supports it 53/47.

In other words, it’s a clean sweep. Simply put, there is no political demographic at all where the CCB/BBA doesn’t get majority support. The BBA on its own does even better. It gets 3-1 support (74/24), and except for those Tea Party opponents (56%) and self-professed liberals (61/37), doesn’t get below 70% support in any demographic.

Guess what doesn’t get much support? The McConnell plan. Respondents rejected the idea of letting Obama raise the debt ceiling on his own, 34/65. Not one single demographic supports the idea, not even Democrats (40/60) or liberals (34/65).

I'm stunned by these results. The Senate should be voting on the Cut, Cap & Balance bill any minute now. Are some of their advisors even now whispering in their ears what the public says it wants? Will they care? Will they care in 2012?

Death at the Margins:

The economic collapse, as hard as it is here, is harder in Africa.

It’s like the developing world version of the US mortgage foreclosure crisis but much more severe, and at the end you don’t lose your house – your kids die of starvation.

Mercy Corps is asking that we Americans treat the developing famine in Africa as we would if it were a tsunami or a flood.

Commentary

Commentary:

Social media is something I haven't paid as much attention to as perhaps I should. I was reading this story, and happened to scroll down to the comments.

The comments are remarkably angry at the whole government project -- even the military, but especially Congress, elected officials, spending programs of all kinds, and any sort of welfare. The "thumbs up/down" feature gives you a sense of how many people approve of various comments, and the attitude among Yahoo users seems to be poisonous.

That's a good sign, from where I sit.

Now That's a Croc

Now That's a Croc

Around here, a gator is big if he's 10 or 12 feet long. Get a load of this 18-foot Australian crocodile. As the host at Never Yet Melted said, I'd like to see what took off his right front leg.

What Is Economics, Anyway?

What Is Economics, Anyway?

There are some theories I've never understood. They always leave me wondering whether the problem is that I'm not smart enough, I'm too ignorant, or the theory is a lot of hooey. For the last couple of years I've been trying to read up on economics, so as to discharge my duty as a voting citizen. I'm still pretty lost.

My husband read me aloud a comment the other day posing this question: If astrology developed into astronomy, and alchemy developed into chemistry, what will economics develop into? I often feel that the economic theory I'm reading about is like phrenology: full of elegant abstract constructs and arcane jargon, but nothing at all to do with the real world.

I've mentioned here before how baffling I find "MMT" or "Modern Monetary Theory," which I run into in the blogosphere with some regularity. One of its clearest and yet most bizarre claims is that, by definition, the amount of possible national private savings must be exactly equal to the national deficit; one cannot exist without the other. Today Zero Hedge is running an article addressing some aspects of MMT and arguing that aggregate constructs like "GDP" and even "the economy" are meaningless. I'm a willing audience, since I've never been able to make much sense of them, either.

The only text on economics that's ever made sense to me is Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics," which makes the simple claim that the economy is hundreds of millions of people setting prices with each other as a means of allocating scarce resources that have alternative uses. By definition, this is not a system amenable to central control. It works as well as it does only because the decisions are delegated as much as possible to the entire population. The theory is that individuals, being closer to the transactions, make better decisions on average than any central planner could do. The system is inefficient and wasteful and full of shocking results, but still better than a centrally planned economy.

Whether or not such a thing could be established theoretically, I'm persuaded that it's true empirically. A central planner may occasionally make a "better" choice about how to use resources than the vast unwashed public does, but by and large the huge, unruly mass of free citizens wins the contest, as demonstrated by the fact that countries with centrally planned economies are poorer than free ones. The free ones are often also more unequal in the distribution of their wealth, of course, but since the poorest citizens in a free economy tend to be rather well of in comparison with the moderately prosperous ones in an economic tyranny, the trade-off suits this voter. That this viewpoint also suits my libertarian views is, I'm sure, merely a coincidence.

All this is apropos of the deficit negotiations in Congress. I'm strongly in favor of reducing the deficit by means of spending cuts, but I'm trying to understand whether adding tax increases is merely an unwelcome necessity, or instead a horrible mistake. Politically, I'm sure tax increases will be necessary. The question is whether they'll do more harm than good: good, because they'll theoretically speed up the process of reducing the deficit (something I scarcely believe, since it's more likely they'll simply be spent again), and harm, because they'll divert resources from the private sphere into the public one, always a net economic loser in my book.

Writing Books

A Few Articles Against Writing of Books:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, some articles demanding an end to all this book-writing that goes on. Indeed, probably many who write books shouldn't do so:

Brian Stelter, The New York Times prodigy and master of social media, announced to his 64,373 followers that he is going to write a book. The obvious question: What’s up with that?

Not that I doubt he can do it. The man The New York Observer calls our “Svelte Twitter Svengali” has a history of setting the bar high and vaulting over it. He files prodigiously for The Times; stars in the new “Page One” documentary; and has promulgated, as of my last check, 21,376 Tweets — not counting the separate Twitter stream where he records every morsel of food he consumes.

Here is a man who probably has nothing to say that he isn't already saying. He has a medium other than books that captures all that he might say -- apparently all he has time to say. So why write a book?

Especially since writing books is very bad for you:

It has become increasingly clear to me over these last 10 years, in which I have written more regularly than before, that the more I write the worse I become. More self-absorbed, less sensitive to the needs of others, less flexible, more determined to say what I have to say, when I want and how I want, if I could only be left alone to figure it out.

And there are so many other things you could be doing instead...

As soon it's inevitable that a writer must begin their first word, it becomes (almost) equally and conflictingly inevitable that the writer must do something else really quickly before scribbling breaks out. Hence the kettle. Tell you what, I'll just go and make a fresh beverage, then I'll get down to things properly. Absolutely. Of course I will.

Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What's that funny noise? Oh look, it's raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache?

We have a few published writers around here. What say you?

Core Commitments

Core Commitments

The White House released a statement this afternoon threatening to veto the "Cut, Cap & Balance" bill if it is approved by Congress. The release explains:

Neither setting arbitrary spending levels nor amending the Constitution is necessary to restore fiscal responsibility. . . . H. R. 2560 sets out a false and unacceptable choice between the Federal Government defaulting on its obligations now or, alternatively, passing a Balanced Budget Amendment that, in the years ahead, will likely leave the Nation unable to meet its core commitment of ensuring dignity in retirement.

Wow. As Ed Morissey at HotAir pointed out, it's a little discouraging to find that the White House believes the only way for this country to assure dignity in retirement is to rely on permanent deficit spending.

Myself, I'm even more startled by the idea that assuring dignity in retirement is the core commitment of our federal government. I think it should be a high priority in the life of every American family, of course, and I'm in favor of doing what we must to alleviate the suffering of desperately poor disabled people, including people suffering from age-related infirmity. But until I reached the end of that sentence, I honestly thought the White House was going to argue that a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution would be too dangerous in times of national military emergency. I guess I don't have my national core commitments straight.

Manhattanhenge

Manhattanhenge

Living in any city, let alone one as tall and crowded and overlit as Manhattan, it's easy to lose sight of the grand march of celestial cycles. Even the sprawling suburbs of my former home, Houston, could obscure them, and even now I can be blinded by my tendency to stay under an air-conditioned roof. We used often to camp on a barrier island near the mouth of the San Bernard River west of Houston, where the terrain was pool-table flat in all directions clear to the horizon: the Gulf of Mexico for half the circle and cord-grass marsh for the other half. The rising and setting of the moon and sun engrossed our attention. Within a few hours I usually found myself wanting to fix a vertical stick in the sand and mark the path of the sun with shells at the ends of the shadows: a miniature sun-worshipping temple.

Manhattan is laid out on a grid that is about 29 degrees off of the east-west axis. As island-dwellers, Manhattanites benefit from relatively unobstructed views of the horizon at the termini of many of their streets. Twice a year, the sun rises at the right angle to shine straight down the streets, like a scene out of Jules Verne or Indiana Jones. The effect on these urban cave-dwellers is galvanic: dozens of them brave traffic to glory in the phenomenon and shoot pictures.

We owe much of our science and philosophy to our ancestors who lay awake under night skies, pondering their order.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Epictetus

Epictetus:

A Stoic philosopher, once a slave, he held:

The third area of study has to do with assent, and what is plausible and attractive. For, just as Socrates used to say that we are not to lead an unexamined life [see Plato, Apology 38a], so neither are we to accept an unexamined impression, but to say, ‘Stop, let me see what you are, and where you come from’, just as the night-watch say, ‘Show me your token.’ (Discourses 3.12.14–15, trans. Hard)

Make it your study then to confront every harsh impression with the words, ‘You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be’. Then test it by those rules that you possess; and first by this–the chief test of all–’Is it concerned with what is in our power or with what is not in our power?’ And if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you.

There sits wisdom.

How to apply it, though? We live in an hour in which we are told that democracy is the answer to political problems; and therefore, we should be interested in the great questions of the day. Yet the systems are such that, short of breaking the systems, we can have no hope of affecting the questions at issue. The law means nothing -- as we have seen in the case of the war in Libya, where the War Powers Act has proven toothless. I am in favor of that war, and indeed of a more emphatic approach to it, but the law is broken here. The administration shows no deference to the law.

The financial issues are as bad, or worse; even the pretense of a Social Security 'lockbox' is being set aside, in order to use Social Security payments as a hostage mechanism to force compliance on raising the debt ceiling. If we cannot? The idea has already been floated of simply asserting that the 14th Amendment permits any increase of the public debt, without question.

It isn't right to say that we can do nothing; but I wonder if we can do anything meaningful that is also lawful. If democracy is the answer, the Stoic philosophy is of less use; we are bound to be involved, and engaged. Should we say that these matters are nothing to us? The laws are carefully crafted to keep our efforts from having an effect; and where they are not, they are ignored outright. What then?

Congrats Japan

Congratulations, Japan:

I just watched the end of the USA/Japan Female World Cup match. The Japanese came from behind to win in the penalty kicks, and with aplomb. Soccer isn't America's game, of course; although women's soccer to some degree is becoming our national female sport, because of Title IX. If this is America's female football, then, we might be expected to do well; and historically, I gather we have. We lost this one fair and square, to a team that gave every appearance of wanting it more, and working harder to capture the prize.

Congratulations to the victor. It was a well-played game.

Faces Matter

Faces:

This article on advertisements and visual tracking technology has some interesting facts. Men look first to the technical data on a car, and don't evaluate its looks until they have a sense of what it can do? (Well, of course.)

The fact that faces draw the most attention is the least surprising piece of information, for those who sometimes watch the BBC.



The rest of it is sometimes intuitive, sometimes counterintuitive: of course women look more at the prices of bikinis, since men are unlikely to buy one; but it is surprising that women look first at the breasts of models, while men spend 40% more time on average on the face.

Get Drunk

"Get Drunk"

A poem, about halfway through this piece by the Clancy Brothers:



"Get drunk, and never pause for rest: with wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you choose."

That's one I had not heard.

Weird Kids

Weird Kids

A friend who really has my number sent me home from a recent visit with a copy of the movie "Temple Grandin." I was curious to watch it, having read about this very high-functioning autistic woman fifteen or twenty years ago in a New Yorker article. It's a wonderful movie. Ms. Grandin made a very successful career designing humane and cost-effective animal-handling systems for cattle feedlot and slaughter operations. Her view is that nature is cruel, but we needn't be. If she were a cow, she wouldn't want to be ripped apart by a large predator but would prefer to have a painless death preceded by a serene life. Realizing that cattle would exist only in zoos if we didn't raise them for our good, she nevertheless felt that we owed them some respect. She persuaded so many feedlot operators of the practicality of her designs that a large fraction of this country's operations use them.

Always baffled by people, Grandin was drawn to cows early in life when she saw the chute used on her uncle's ranch to restrain the animals for innoculation. She realized that she, too, would find the squeezed-in retractable walls soothing during one of her frequent over-stimulated panic attacks, so she built a version for her own use. It raised many eyebrows in her dorm room at college. Later in life, she would explain that autistic children need hugs to calm down, but can't bear to receive them from people.

In the same vein, I'm reading Thomas Sowell's "The Einstein Syndrome," about children (like Einstein, and like Richard Feynman) who begin to talk very late, at age 3, 4, or even 5. We had a family friend like that, one of my father's colleagues, who never said a word until he was about 4, then burst out with "Look at the little bird up in the tree." Those children tend to grow up to be a little ways down the autism spectrum disorder, and very often become yet another mathematician or musician or engineer in a family already unusually full of them. Sowell's own son was that way. His family installed child-gates in the open doorways, with supposedly childproof locks. When the infant boy instantly got the first one open, they installed a more complicated one. He stared at it for quite a while without moving, then opened it on the first try. At age 3, he was forbidden to touch his father's chess set, which normally stood in his study with the pieces in mid-game. One day his father came in and found him playing with the pieces all over the floor. When he angrily demanded that his son put the pieces back on the board, the boy instantly replaced them in exactly the mid-game position in which he had found them.

There's a lot we don't know about how the mind works.

West Oversea

West Oversea Book Trailer:

Our friend Lars Walker has done something I haven't seen before, which is to make a video trailer for his book.



The book you can get here. Nicely done, Mr. Walker.

Project Valour IT

Project VALOUR-IT Update:

The fundraiser ends tomorrow, and we are very far from its goal. There is little chance we will reach it -- perhaps a war weary nation, in the deepest recession in generations, is hard pressed to find anything to offer.

Nevertheless, I hope you will read BLACKFIVE's post on the subject. Once you have you must do what you think is best, and what is right for your families at a difficult time.

A Stout Orange Flute

A Stout Orange Blade:

It's the 12th of July.



Happy Boyne Day, Major Leggett!

UPDATE: And since it is, why not an Irish night? The summer has few enough joys.









That last band is Sgian Dubh -- "Black Knife," the hidden blade a good warrior keeps secretly about himself at all times -- from Marietta, Georgia.

Here they are again:





And watch this one, from the same set. This was obviously done when the Clancy Brothers were at the height of fame, for the people in the good seats are too well-mannered to sing along in the spirit of the thing. The worse for them! Malory's gentleman -- take Uther Pendragon, whom Malory praised as "a lusty knyghte" -- would find his company in the cheap seats.

Boston Opera

Boston Early Music Festival:

I haven't been to Boston since 1996, when I took refuge there briefly from the Olympics that were bedeviling Atlanta. To judge from Heather Mac Donald's review, though, I'm sorry I am missing their Early Music Festival.

Steffani was a priest as well as composer, which suggests how differently that vocation was understood in the seventeenth century. Niobe’s libretto, written by a court secretary in Munich, Luigi Orlandi, contains some of the most voluptuously erotic writing since Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.... Niobe’s high point is an unworldly aria, “Sfere amiche” (friendly spheres), without counterpart before or since. Theban King Anfione, renown in classical myth for his supernatural musical powers, has abdicated his throne to devote himself to celestial contemplation. In a vision of mystical transcendence, he calls both on the celestial spheres to give his lips their harmony and on earthly nature to take its motion from his breathing.

More Shape Notes

More Shape Notes

I know someday I'll convert some of you. This clip has four excellent songs (Poland, Consecration, Stratfield, and China), performed by Irish singers at the First Ireland Sacred Harp Convention in a fine old church. The singers know what they're doing.

Poland

God of my life, look gently down

Behold the pain I feel

But I am dumb before Thy throne

Nor dare dispute Thy will

VALOURIT

Project VALOUR-IT Update:

The Marine team is behind somewhat, but overall the campaign is about a quarter of the way to its goal.



If you wish to contribute, you can do so by clicking the button below.

Barefoot Running

Running:

As close as to a weaving woman's breast the bar
of warp is drawn, when accurately she passes
shuttle and spool along the meshing web
and holds to her breast one weighted bar, so close
in second place Odysseus ran: his feet
came sprinting in the other's tracks before
the dust fell, and on Aias' nape he blew
hot breath as he ran on. All the Akhaians
cheered for Odysseus, the great contender
and called to him as he ran with laboring heart.
But entering the last hundred yards, Odysseus
prayed in his heart to the grey-eyed one, Athena:

"Hear me, goddess: come, bless me with speed!

-The Iliad, Book 23, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Another thing that I have been doing lately is running barefoot. This is something that came from my sister, whose running has lately come to embrace marathons. A few years ago in New York, she studied with Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen. His thesis is that humanity evolved to hunt through long-distance running, pacing prey to exhaustion. Running therefore should come as naturally to us as it does to wolves, loping over the hills.

The key secret hit me like a thunderbolt. It was so simple, yet such a jolt. It was this: everything I’d been taught about running was wrong. We treat running in the modern world the same way we treat childbirth—it’s going to hurt, and requires special exercises and equipment, and the best you can hope for is to get it over with quickly with minimal damage.

Then I meet the Tarahumara, and they’re having a blast. They remember what it’s like to love running, and it lets them blaze through the canyons like dolphins rocketing through waves. For them, running isn’t work. It isn’t a punishment for eating. It’s fine art, like it was for our ancestors. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.

Odysseus is an interesting example of that ethic from the ancient Greek. Reading his description in the Iliad, he is the last of the heroes we would think of as likely to win contests for speed: he is shorter than the other heroes, for one thing, and somewhat older than many.

To the Greeks it seemed natural that he should nevertheless be a great runner. In the Homeric period of literature, there is an emphasis on what later Greeks would call "essential nature." Odysseus' essential nature is to be a troublemaker -- that is what the name "Odysseus" means. He is therefore wily in strategy and counsel, speedy with his glib tongue and, when necessary, his feet. This is why, when the Trojan scout Dolon comes down to spy upon the Greek camp, Odysseus is one of the two Greeks who is wary enough to spot him, and speedy enough to catch one of Troy's fastest runners.

Mr. McDougall has the opposite physical problems: he is six-foot-four, and weighs over two hundred pounds. When asked about whether that suggests that he isn't built for running, he scoffs. "I bought into that bull for a loooong time.... so many doctors are reinforcing this learned helplessness, this idea that you have to be some kind of elite being to handle such a basic, universal movement."

My own experience has been that my feet have toughened up nicely over the last few months, so that running is easy on sand, concrete, grass, or any other surface except superheated summer blacktop. It is more pleasant than any running I can remember having done, except when I used to run over Burnt Mountain -- and that was only because the surroundings were so much more beautiful, and so much better suited to my own essential nature.

Mothers Against Drunk Yogurt Making

Mothers Against Drunk Yogurt Making

My tiny nearby town boasts only two grocery stores, the WalMart and an HEB. Unfortunately both have stopped carrying the yogurt that I'm addicted to, a nice live-culture product called White Mountain. Recent events having impressed on me even more deeply than usual the importance of probiotics, I decided to take matters into my own hands and acquire a simple yogurt-maker, which has duly arrived in the mail. It's just a specialized sort of crockpot, really, a convenient nest for individual yogurt bottles and a low heat source so the little microbeasties can work overnight at a constant temperature.

Reading the directions, I stopped to ponder the surprisingly long list of "IMPORTANT SAFEGUARDS" for this simple device. Don't drop the device into water, for instance, while it's still plugged in. Even more important: "To unplug, grasp plug and pull from the electrical outlet." And again, further down the page, to reinforce the subtle and unfamiliar lesson: "Plug cord into the wall outlet. To disconnect remove plug from wall outlet." A third time: "To disconnect, turn any control to 'off,' then remove plug from wall outlet." I'm glad we got that cleared up before I had to call the helpline -- or an ambulance.

"Do not touch the parts that are not intended for manipulation." I'm so confused; what parts are intended for manipulation? There's an on/off switch, but that's about it, other than the lid. The warnings become even more dire: "Do not operate . . . while under the influence of alcohol or other substances that affect your reaction time or perception." I'm wondering whether I'll need certification training for this thing. What if my reaction times are off? What if I aim at the "on" switch and miss? Can I sue?

Finally, the only warning with plausible pertinence to the sort of danger a consumer could conceivably be in from a device that creates a live-culture food: "Do not keep yogurt in the refrigerator for more than 8-10 days." I don't actually believe that advice, so it's probably wasted on me, but OK, I'll think about it. Consider me warned.

On behalf of lawyers everywhere, I apologize for the destruction of our society and culture.

Don't Let This Man Near the Press Conference

Don't Let This Man Near the Press Conference

Iowahawk has some proposed questions for the President:

. . . Instead of making cars get 62 mpg, why not 62 million mpg? Also, do something about the gravitational constant.

. . . I let my Mexican drug lord license expire. Am I still eligible for the free machine gun program?

. . . When you said "days not weeks" did you mean Venusian days?

. . . Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?

. . . Would you get tougher with Iran if you knew they were working with Scott Walker?

. . . I just voted to increase my sobriety ceiling. Why won't the bartender give me another drink?

. . . If ATMs are so bad, why do you keep treating me like one?

. . . When you create jobs, why do always create them for Texas?

. . . If Eric Holder gets indicted in Operation Fast & Furious, should he get a civilian trial?

Death by Baseball

Living and Dying:

I've been thinking some more about our recent conversations because of yesterday's tragic story from Texas.

This has to be the saddest possible event at a baseball game. A man goes to a ballgame with his son — it's the ultimate American experience — and he dies trying to catch a ball. It's hard to comprehend.

As for the need to raise the railings, or not throw balls into the stands ... that's the crazy part. How many thousands of games happen where nobody gets hurt, and now this?

The same is true for the poor motorcycle rider who was killed, of course: how many thousands of miles did he ride without any incident?

We usually make reference to statistics in cases like this, as statistics allows us to overcome our actual experience. We may have the actual experience of having ridden thousands of miles in safety, but statistics show that the activity is dangerous in spite of abundant direct experience of safety.

Yet statistics are famously easy to manipulate. I've been reading up on motorcycle safety statistics since our discussion, to try and find out just how much helmets really do improve safety. Do they actually improve -- as I understand they do not, from conversations with other riders?

I'm still not sure, but I do now know that most surveys seem to be peformed either by (a) helmet manufacturers, or (b) groups that already believed that helmets were a good idea (e.g., Snell). Confirmation bias is a danger even for the hardest science; when political advocacy -- or profit -- is at issue, it's harder to rely on the claims of such studies. For example, I wasn't able to find anything like a dividing line on the speeds at which helmets seem to be effective at reducing risk of injury. That may mean no one thought to ask, or it may be that the question was intentionally not asked.

Finally, though, I've realized what it is about this discussion that has been bothering me. I've spoken of my friend the father of two special needs children, and how proud I am of how he soldiers on under this incredibly heavy weight. When we were talking about motorcycle riders, the point was made by several of you that a man who is a husband and father has a responsibility to limit his risks in order to continue to live to perform his duties to wives and children.

However, a life that has become a misery is a weight that is even more likely to kill a man than any motorcycle. Heart disease is strongly linked to stress, as are many other diseases; and a man who dies of a heart attack at 48, though he bore his burden faithfully, has left his wife and children just as completely widowed and orphaned.

I work hard to try and get my friend to come with me to the gym, or otherwise to find pleasure and exercise of vital faculties; but the man is run down. Without joy in life, death follows: and if an activity greatly brings you joy, even if it is a risky activity, it may be worth doing for that reason alone.

More, a miserable life is no fit reception to the wonder of creation. God may not be pleased with your sacrifice if you have taken the gift of life and squandered it -- not on risking death trying to catch a fly ball for your son, but on letting even the most wise and proper responsibility rob you of the joy and wonder that you should find in His creation. You needn't put that in theological terms to get the same point: Plato called this wonder, which was the beginning of all philosophy, thaumazein.

The good life, then, and our ideals about how to live it need to capture a space for that wonder and joy. This is a duty, and a moral duty, as imperative to the good life as meeting responsibilities. It often entails risk -- climbing mountains, riding horses, drinking beer of an evening with friends, standing up to dangerous men with evil in their hearts. These are the things that make life joyous, and therefore we must do them. When performing a duty, we take reasonable steps to mitigate risk -- but we perform our duty regardless of risk.

That seems to resolve the problem, and the paradox, from my perspective.

Ideals

The Masculine Ideal:

Recently we discussed some examples from Dr. Hodges' "Wounded Masculinity: Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur." As I think more about it, I wonder if some of you might not be interested in his broader thesis. His piece is a pretty strong one in terms of suggesting that we should re-evaluate a lot of the assumptions of scholarship on what the masculine ideal might be.

In gender studies, critics frequently postulate a masculine ideal of
suave and potent invulnerability and then demonstrate how the
male characters in question inevitably fall short of it. Bryce Traister
has offered a thorough critique of this tendency in American studies,
arguing that the focus on “transcendent” masculinity obscures study
of “competent” masculinity—ideas of manliness as they are actually
practiced. Unfortunately, the same tendency can be seen in medieval
studies. While invulnerability and easy power may be fantasies for individual
men, these daydreams do not reflect the more realistic ideals of
manhood expressed in a work such as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur.

We examined several cases last time of knightly suffering -- not only in Malory, but in medieval nonfiction -- that show this alternative ideal at work.

These celebrations of knightly suffering as admirable penance mean
that injury was not simply a messy historical fact edited out of the
romanticized ideal of knighthood; instead, the ideal of masculinity that
chivalric texts celebrate is one that includes being wounded regularly.
This fits not only with the historical realities of knighthood but also
with the needs of narrative....

An example of how this narrative logic works is Arthur’s fight with
Accolon (1:141–47; 4.8–11). Although Merlin has told Arthur that Excalibur’s
scabbard is more valuable than the sword itself because it
prevents the wearer from losing blood (1:54; 1.25), this information
does not become an issue in any of Arthur’s fights until he meets Accolon,
and then it is Accolon who is wearing the scabbard. What follows
should be, according to some models of gender, the wreck of Arthur as
a man: he is pierced and bleeding, on the verge of defeat, and all as the
object of a woman’s gaze, since Nyneve is watching. The description of
the fight emphasizes Arthur’s blood falling from him, weakening him,
staining the ground. But Nyneve, instead of seeing him as feminized
and diminished, judges him a good knight and a man of worship because
of, not despite of, his suffering on the field (1:144; 4.10). Arthur’s
ability to bleed, although a liability in strictly practical terms, highlights
his bravery and commitment to his cause, in contrast to Accolon’s smug
safety. Instead of proving him less of a man, Arthur’s wounds illustrate
that he is full of pure knighthood...

[W]hen Launcelot runs mad, those who find him treat him
well: “Whan they sawe so many woundys upon hym, they demed that
he had bene a man of worship” (2:822; 12.3). Likewise, when Launcelot
is praising La Cote Mal Tayle, he points out to the Damsel Maldisaunt
the young knight’s wounds, not as signs of failure (as in the past she
might have considered them) but of honor: “Now may ye se . . . that
he ys a noble knyght, for to consider hys firste batayle, and his grevous
woundis. And evyn forthwithall, so wounded as he ys, hit ys mervayle
that he may endure thys longe batayle."

There's a lot more, though I may be pushing the limits of 'fair use' for this discussion if I quote more; but I think it's an interesting thesis. What do you think?

Gandalf

Gandalf:

Continuing the meditation on independence, I saw several fireworks displays this weekend, both government-run and privately-funded. The government run displays involved far more expensive fireworks, and were more elaborate; but the aggregate of the individual actors who bought their own fireworks was ultimately more impressive than the aggregate government displays.

There's probably a lesson in that somewhere, but our friends on the left might note that not everyone is a trained fireworks engineer; I noted the fact myself after watching a guy set off a mortar that exploded a fraction of a second after launch, perhaps ten feet in the air. No one was hurt, but they certainly could have been.

Independent people get to do this kind of stuff, even though it entails some significant risk. That's what freedom is. Sometimes, of course, freedom kills.

A New York man died Sunday while participating in a ride with 550 other motorcyclists to protest the state’s mandatory helmet law.

Police said Philip A. Contos, 55, hit his brakes and his motorcycle fishtailed. Contos was sent over the handlebars of his 1983 Harley Davidson and hit his head on the pavement.

I sometimes ride motorcycles without a helmet, and always ride horses without one (that's what Stetson hats are for). In fact it is truly pleasurable, tooling down a backroad or a two-lane highway, feeling the wind on your face, and without the heavy helmet wearying the muscles of your neck. I'm not sympathetic to the joyless nanny-state crowd that wants to tell me that their interest in having to pay for my possible medical care gives them the right to tell me that I shouldn't do dangerous things.

Keep your medical care, if it comes to that. (My sister, who shares more than my genetics, tells me she is taking up BASE jumping as her retirement plan.) I certainly do not wish to suffer head injuries or any other injuries; but I wouldn't want a safe life. It's not the life for me. If that means my life ends up being short, well, so be it; I'll run my hazards.

Independence Day

Independence Day:

I entered my specifications into Google, and the first hit was a Sugar Daddy dating site. “No way,” I thought. “I’m not a golddigger, I just want a man who has his shit together.” But the tagline had already hooked me– “Meet Wealthy Men Seeking to Spoil Beautiful Women!” It felt like I had just been challenged… was I attractive and charming enough to pique the interest of a successful millionaire? My mind raced. Is this thinly-veiled prostitution? Were there really men out there who wanted to buy me shoes? I like shoes! Was this going to affect how I identified myself as an intelligent, independent woman? PRESENTS! I caved. I set up a profile, paid the membership fee, and waited to see what would happen.

Independence is an interesting concept, and one that merits some discussion. Little Bill constitutes himself a defender of it -- and he is, presuming that by "independence" we mean the right to pass laws in concert which block the individual right to the means of self-defense. The people of that little town are independent if anyone is: any man who is interested is capable of joining the local militia, so the denial of self-defense is mostly aimed at outsiders. They build a great deal of power into their community, and use that power to enforce a law that denies basic rights to others. They are satisfied with the state they have built because they participate in it; it only oppresses others. That is independence, as long as they can retain control of the beast they have made.

The article, via the Sage of Knoxville, points to another kind of independent decision. The writer has independently chosen to become a dependent upon someone else; in return for affection, he pays her bills. She asserts that she is just as independent now as she was before -- perhaps moreso, having fewer bills and debts. It is a free choice she has made, which has made her in one sense freer yet; but in another, perhaps, less independent than she believes.

I don't raise the article to condemn, but to wonder at the way in which independence is a slippery thing. I gave up a great deal of my own independence when I married, some years ago; that was a free choice to become less free, to bind myself. At the time I was most independent, all I wanted was to find someone else to depend upon; at the time I was freest, I wanted nothing so much as to be bound. This seems to be true for individuals and for peoples, for towns and for nations. Freed of all obligations in 1781, we turned at once to forging new chains, laws, and orders.

UPDATE: More thoughts on the question from E. J. Dionne:

[O]ur friends in the Tea Party have offered a helpful clue by naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor.

Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy.

Most of these last ten years, since 9/11, I've placed myself at the service of the United States government in one capacity or another. The military of the United States is by far the best part of its several bureaucracies; too, it has the benefit of being pointed outward, so that its mistakes are felt by others instead of ourselves. They work very hard to avoid civilian casualties in drone strikes, for example, but nevertheless once in a while it does happen. This is the best the United States has to offer, and having seen it up close for a long time, I am very glad to have the force of that system pointed elsewhere. The parts of the Federal government that point at us are far less pleasant, and less noble, and we might be happier to do without them.

I think that there may indeed be something illegitimate about a government as large and as distant as this one has become. Legitimacy in politics comes from a relationship between yourself and the state: it is the relationship of parent to child, more or less. A family relationship binds best when it is closest. A father and a son are tightly bound if they live together, and are close; but a father who walked away in youth would exercise far less legitimate authority, and a fifth cousin almost none.

The town council, the parent-teacher association, these are close relationships; the state is farther away, but our representative is close enough that we can know him and be sure of his vote. Congress is so far away that we get little more than form letters even from our individual representatives or Senators; and these are too small to much shift the weight of the great Federal bureaucracy.

A legitimate government might need to be small, small enough to hear the voice of the one man who has something important to say. The question is whether such a government can survive: lacking a Leviathan like our military, what would keep such a government intact against the winds of the world? In this hour, it is our task and honor to be that Leviathan; but I often wonder if, though we devote a great deal of our efforts to trying to do it in a moral as well as an effective way, we will be forgiven for all we must do to preserve the order of the world. As General McChrystal said, we have shot an amazing number of people.

Whether or not our government can still claim to be legitimate, America is certainly no longer independent. We have taken on the burden of holding up the world; and thus we are bound to it. Events in Thailand or Yemen or Zanzibar, small places on the other side of the world, echo in our halls and keep us awake at night. Their problems are our own. Perhaps this is what we always wanted; in any case, I do not know how to lay the burden down, or if it is right that we should.

This post is more akin to Kipling's "Recessional" than it is to a celebration of our nation; and for that I apologize, my friends. I hope your holiday was a fine one, and my troubled thoughts do not limit your enjoyment of your friends and family.

VALOURITUSMC

Project VALOUR-IT: Annual Fundraiser

Again this year, I have been asked to participate in the USMC team, Project VALOUR-IT. I always agree to do this even though I have no idea how to go about asking for someone's money; and especially in hard times like this -- the economy is bad, many of you may be out of work or underemployed, and the government is pressing so many new regulations and taxes that it will be hard for any recovery to be possible -- people often simply can't be sure that they can afford to give anything.

Nevertheless, VALOUR-IT deserves your attention because it helps those who have already given to you. As surely all of you know by now, the name stands for Voice Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops. The project was started by Chuck Ziegenfuss, based on his own experience of being without the use of his hands following an encounter with an IED in Iraq. He has since returned to service, and is doing very well; but in addition to his continued service to our country, he has devoted himself to helping those soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen who may follow him through the hard path of recovery.

Honor is sacrifice, and this project honors those who have sacrificed a great deal for us. It is right and proper that we should honor, and sacrifice, for them. Therefore, please consider donating as you are able; and even if it is not much that you can spare, remember the story of the widow's mite.

"If This Goes On --"

"If This Goes On --"

I've found an entertaining site for speculative fiction fans like myself, called Paleofuture: The Future That Never Was." The host finds old stories and articles speculating about the future, then looks at what was easy to foresee and what snuck up on everyone. This entry caught my eye: it speculated that future governments would turn most issues into instant public referenda by publicizing the dispute and asking everyone to vote on it electronically at once. Somehow nothing like that seems to have happened. It amuses me to read, nevertheless, because the yearning behind the prediction is for something we already have in an important institution: the free market. The whole theory of the free market is that billions of individual decisions get made in real time every day, spread out to the individual consumers in the farthest corners of the nation and world. These decisions control the allocation of our scarce resources that have alternative uses, merely by setting prices that respond to supply and demand. It's inefficient, wasteful, and cold-blooded, and has only the advantage that it produces more widespread prosperity and avoids more misery than any other system ever tried.

Our government reflects the prevailing mindset of Americans, which is to pay lip service to the free market but not really to trust it very thoroughly. I'd be awfully surprised to see the government moving toward frequent plebiscites on any important issues if they could possibly avoid it. Robert Tracinski opines today on RealClearMarkets about how it can have happened that the current administration can have achieved an expense education without learning the first thing about how our economy works:

Consider Obama's background. He grew up among leftists, his childhood mentors were outright communists, and he then went off to academia, where he spent his formative years in an environment where business and profit-making are looked down upon as ugly, dirty, rapacious, immoral. Is it any mystery why he doesn't know about business or economics? Asking him to study the economics of the free market is like asking one of the old New England Puritans to thumb through a manual on sex education. Why immerse oneself in a subject that is so unseemly? Why make a study of how to be immoral?

Meanwhile, what I'm hoping for from the future is a better way to perform a certain exam that people of my age are all too familiar with. Preparation the day before involves drinking a very large quantity of a substance that tastes like melted jello infused with the flavor of old latex gloves, flavored with off-brand diet soda. I hope all your prayers and good thoughts will be with me as I await the results this afternoon.

Institutions

An Institution:

This is a fascinating account of the development of Trinity College, where many of the most powerful women in America were educated.

Some of you may be put off by the fact that the article is clearly celebrating liberal women leaders, but don't be. This story is a very important one, as it highlights the way that crucial institutions are built. The builders in this case are spirited Catholic nuns.

If our civilization is to be saved, we also must build institutions. Recapturing and repairing broken ones may sometimes be possible, but very often it is easier -- and wiser -- to start anew.

In Catholicism, different religious orders describe themselves as each having a distinct “charism.” The term refers partly to the basic mission of an order, but also to a more intangible set of attitudes—a spiritual temperament that traces back to the group’s founding. The charism of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur involves running schools for women and girls. More than that, though, it entails a spirit of ambitious enterprise and fierce autonomy—a refusal to take no for an answer in the face of institutional authority.

We need some institutions each having a charism fitting our project. Yet I honestly would not know how to begin; I suppose you must begin with money.

Etiquette

Etiquette:

Normally, when one has a guest who violates some rule of manners, it is most praiseworthy to avoid drawing attention to it. When that person happens to wish to join your family -- so that they are petitioning not merely to be a guest, but a daughter -- there may be occasions when you have to express your dismay. After all, once married into your family, their bad manners will stand as a charge against you and your entire family!

Needless to say, this is precisely the opposite of the reaction of the journalist covering this story.

Southerners

"Southerners"

Dad29 had an interesting piece on a critic who worried -- in the 1930s -- that "Southern" ideas no longer received a fair hearing.

Can principles enunciated as Southern principles, of whatever cast, get a hearing?” he inquired in The Attack on Leviathan. “ . . . It seems to be a rule that the more special the program and the more remote it is from Southern principles, the greater the likelihood of its being discussed and promulgated. Southerners who wish to engage in public discussion in terms that do not happen to be of common report in the New York newspapers are likely to be met, at the levels where one would least expect it, with the tactics of distortion, abuse, polite tut-tutting, angry discrimination and so on down to the baser devices of journalistic lynching which compose the modern propagandist’s stock in trade. This is an easy and comparatively certain means of discrediting an opponent and of thus denying him a hearing.

As Dad29 points out, the "South" was only the leading edge here: the mechanism is currently being employed against rural Americans regardless of how northerly their point of origin. The relentless 'distortion, abuse, tut-tutting and discrimination' aimed at Sarah Palin during her run for the Vice Presidency is exactly of this type; and Alaska is pretty far north!

We're seeing the same thing aimed at Rep. Michelle Bachmann, and Christopher Hitchens -- whom I've often praised for his several good qualities -- gave the game away:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it's good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on. Hence one's glee at the resulting helpings of custard.

While I share Hitchen's enthusiasm for the Libyan adventure -- if only it were properly pursued -- I find his disdain for the rural to be remarkably ill-informed. I have lived in small towns and big ones, urban America and rural America and densely-populated China; and of it all, rural America really does have a special set of virtues. I trust the gentleman from England doesn't realize it, perhaps having missed the opportunity -- or, perhaps, he simply lacks the right kind of eye.

Still, there is something to be said for the prejudice. Cities also produce a number of disagreeable qualities, and frankly I hate them. I hate them never more than when I'm forced to be inside one for any extended period. Yet it is good that there are cities, if only so that there are fewer people in the woods. The more people who share the prejudice, the more likely I am to be left in peace.

Wounds

Wounds and Manhood:

Dr. Kenneth Hodges wrote:

Wounds do not mark failures in the effort to be knightly. Although
each wound might be said to result from a failure to ward a blow properly,
the inevitability of this happening some times even to the best
knights means knights had to deal with the fact that they would be
hurt. Medieval sources testify to the thorough understanding that being
injured was an essential part of knighthood, even for the best knights.
Geoffroi de Charny, when he compares knighthood to religious orders,
emphasizes the injuries that knights regularly suffer. Likewise, Margery
Kempe uses knights as seeming commonplace images of bodily pain and
penance. Malory’s Gawain unwisely makes a similar argument in the
Grail quest: “I may do no penaunce, for we knyghtes adventures many
tymes suffir grete woo and payne.”

...

Maurice Keen quotes several
men who justified tournaments precisely because they taught men how
to deal with pain. Roger of Hovedon said, “he is not fit for battle who
has never seen his own blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch
under the blow of an opponent,” and Henri de Laon agreed, writing,
“to be soaked [in] one’s own sweat and blood, that I call the true bath of
honour.”

This strikes me as relevant to contemporary social issues as well; but I won't draw the lines too finely.

Beer Goddess

Give Me That Old Time Religion:

It's good enough for me!

The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

We really need to regard the end of the "beer goddess" as a kind of giant backwards step in civilization.

Walzer Maimonides

Walzer on Maimonides, Charity, and Justice:

Michael Walzer, a leftist thinker who has written one of the most important modern works on Just War Theory, has a new piece on questions of charity and justice. He is interested in the Jewish model -- because it was stateless -- which strikes him as useful because, in the (hopefully continual) absence of a global state, he believes that all of us are stateless. This leads to some interesting lines.

With little or no coercive power, the Jewish communities in the Diaspora had to rely heavily on the charitable contributions of their members. The contributions were indeed necessary, for without them there would be no way, for example, to ransom Jewish captives (a major concern of the Diaspora communities throughout the Middle Ages), help the poor and the sick, provide for orphans, or fund synagogues and schools. And so the medieval philosopher Maimonides argued, following Talmudic precedents, that insofar as Jewish communities in the Diaspora had coercive power, they could legitimately force their members to give tzedakah.

...

Pledge cards were distributed, filled out at the table, and then put in an envelope and passed to the head of the table. There sat the owner of one of the biggest stores in town -- let's call him Sam Shapiro. Sam knew everybody else's business: who was doing well and who was not, who was paying college tuition for their children, who had a sick mother, who had recently made a loan to a bankrupt brother, who had money to spare. He opened each envelope, looked at the pledge, and if he thought that it was not enough, he tore the card in half and passed it back down the table... What moral or philosophical principle was Sam enforcing? He probably could not have answered that question, but the answer seems obvious: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That line is from Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. Sam was not a Marxist, not by a long shot, but he adjusted the demands he made on each of us to his knowledge of our ability to pay. And we all believed that the UJA would distribute the money to those most in need.

A strongly left-leaning thinker will find these principles easier to endorse than a right-leaning one; but Walzer is worth engaging even for those on the right. For example, he has this to say:

What does it mean to address the needs of the poor? This, too, is a question not only of charity but also of justice. Maimonides has a famous discussion of the eight levels of tzedakah, but only two need concern us here. The highest form of charitable giving, he wrote, is to set up a poor man in business or in work of some sort, to make him independent.

All of this talk of charity is directed toward a final assessment of humanitarian invasions. Walzer has an interesting history here, having strongly favored them before the Iraq war... and then, for reasons that strike me as being out of line with the principles he argued so well in Just and Unjust Wars, finding ways to oppose the invasion of Iraq. See what you think.

Piva

Piva:

Performed by Les haulz et les bas.