Grim's Hall

President Dunning-Kruger?

PRESIDENT DUNNING-KRUGER

One of the more entertaining of Obama's campaign promises was his oft-repeated vow to "Restore Science to Its Rightful Place":

How is his administration doing so far? It has failed to strengthen protections for endangered species, appointed officials with long records of suppressing politically inconvenient science, ignored new evidence-based recommendations for breast-cancer screening, failed to remove all restrictions from embryonic stem-cell science and ignored decades of research in a politically motivated effort to prevent nuclear waste from being stored at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Dude... why so harsh? I can't think of a single public servant who has done more to increase public awareness of the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Give Barack his due: when it comes to increasing public awareness of the value of scientific inquiry, he walks the walk. Thank God the Smart Folks are back in charge:

"I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers," [Obama] reportedly told an aide in 2008. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm . . . a better political director than my political director."

And unlike the ignorant and arrogant BusHitler administration, they're humble, too.

Instrumental

Instrumental:

Ya'll are cheating yourselves if you don't watch the last few minutes of the last one, at least.

Rass 17%

Rasmussen: 17% Say the US Gov't Has Consent of Governed

That's the top line finding, in any case.

Daniel W. Drezner asks if he's missing anything:

The first line line of defense has been breached, but the second line of defense looks increasingly robust. Public opinion poll after public opinion poll in the wake of the debt deal show the same thing -- everyone in Washington is unpopular, but Congress is really unpopular and GOP members of Congress are ridiculously unpopular. At a minimum, S&P needs to calculate how the current members of Congress will react to rising anti-incumbent sentiment. If they did that analysis and concluded that nothing would be done, I'd understand their thinking more. I didn't see anything like that kind of political analysis in their statement, however.

In the end, I suspect Moody's and Fitch won't follow S&P's move, so this could be a giant nothingburger. Still, if these guys are going to be doing political risk analysis, it might help to actually have some political scientists on the payroll. Based on their statement, S&P is simply extrapolating from the op-ed page, and that's a lousy way to make a political forecast.

Am I missing anything?

Well, yes, you are: national public opinion polls cut very nicely against the President, whoever he is; but Congressmen are elected by district, and Senators by state. A Senator can be 0% popular outside his state and still win re-election; and a Representative can be 0% popular outside his district and still do so.

Opinon poll after opinion poll has shown, and for decades, that people hate Congress but roughly speaking support their own representatives. That being so, the findings on Congress aren't especially relevant to our diagnosis.

Retrospection:

As my time at the undisclosed location comes to a close -- I'll go so far as to name it the Tampa region -- I'd like to take a moment to speak to what I'll remember about the place.

Here a couple of Mr. Wolf's bikes.

The "small" one in the foreground -- it's a 1200 cc Harley -- is one I spent about a month riding. It's a good little bike, though you can't go a day without stopping by a gas station. The bigger one with the red rims and the whitewall tires is his bagger.

Here is my current bike, which I have named "Lady Luck." There are good and sufficient reasons for this which I won't go into as at this time.

Lady Luck outside a hole in the wall on the Gulf of Mexico which I highly recommend to those of you who normally carry knives about your daily business. The guitarist on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday is the most talented I've ever seen in person. He not only seems to know every song written between 1940 and the present day, he can improvise with them -- and lead his three-or-four piece band along while he does it. The fourth piece is a harmonica, wielded sometimes by an old hippie who drops in when he feels like it.

Not every bike survived the approach.

A shrine to the owner, Master Sergeant John Susor, whose service was in WWII. The place is full of tributes to him, especially news clippings with headlines like: "Bar owner says he was acting in self-defense when he took up his pickaxe" or "Bar owner arrested for gambling" or "Notorious bar owner running for mayor." He passed on in 2008, and I'm sorry I didn't have the honor of meeting him in person.

One of two cats and two Pit Bulls who live at this bar. The elder Pit Bull is quite old, and mostly sleeps on the couch nearest the band. She is quite content to have a man -- a man fearless of dogs, at least -- sit on the couch and spend an hour petting her.

The rules posted on the bar advise complainers, "The animals live here, and you don't." Fair warning!

Ah, "folk art."

More folk art. The table is as off-level as any I've ever played on, and we could only find one pool stick in the place with cork on its tip. Good game, all the same.

If any of you find yourselves with business at SOCOM or CENTCOM, and share my own impulses, you could do worse for yourselves.

Truck Driver

The Story of a Truck Driver:

The personal part of this story is tragic, but the basic facts of truck-driving are universal.

His truck is governed to 68 miles an hour, because the company he leases it from believes it keeps him and the public and the equipment safer.

The truck he passed was probably running under 65 mph to conserve fuel. You see, the best these trucks do for fuel economy is about 8 miles per gallon. With fuel at almost $4 per gallon -- well, you do the math. And, yes, that driver pays for his own fuel.

He needs to be 1,014 miles from where he loaded in two days. And he can't fudge his federally mandated driver log, because he no longer does it on paper; he is logged electronically.

He can drive 11 hours in a 14-hour period; then he must take a 10-hour break. And considering that the shipper where he loaded held him up for five hours because it is understaffed, he now needs to run without stopping for lunch and dinner breaks.

If he misses his delivery appointment, he will be rescheduled for the next day, because the receiver has booked its docks solid (and has cut staff to a minimum). That means the driver sits, losing 500-plus miles for the week.

Which means his profit will be cut, and he will take less money home to his family. Most of these guys are gone 10 days, and home for a day and a half, and take home an average of $500 a week if everything goes well.

"If."

Mead

The Invisible Hand is Writing:

Walter Russell Mead has been producing a lot of interesting stuff lately. I think I almost wholly agree with this piece, which may be biasing me in judging its quality; but I think it is rightly put.

Doc Russia used to quote Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." Yes, I remember thinking: that's right. The old rules, the simple rules, the ones so many thought they left behind with childood -- thought they had become too sophisticated to believe -- are the real rules of the world.

Hostage-Taking

Hostage-Taking

In the recent blanket coverage of the debt crisis, the ongoing story about Congress's failure to extend funding for the Federal Aviation Administration got a bit lost. The limited coverage concentrated on the ping-pong aspect of legislative gamesmanship. Something rang a bell, though, when I read that the House had passed a bill with a short-term extension of funding, which the Senate refused either to vote on or to propose an alternative to, instead demanding that the House try again with something more palatable to the Senate. Hey, that sounds a lot like what happened with the debt ceiling. In my line of work, we call that negotiating against yourself.

Not only does Harry Reid demand that the House negotiate against itself, but he accuses it of taking hostages. I think what he's talking about is the usual process of offering legislative compromises: we'll give you something you want rather desperately, but we intend to exact a price. Senate Democratic leaders are demanding what's come to be called lately a "clean" bill, which is one that extends FAA funding without including two irritating conditions: (1) cuts to subsidies for rural airports and (2) a re-instatement of the decades-long traditional rule for unionizing an FAA facility (recently overturned by regulatory fiat) requiring a majority vote of all workers instead of merely a majority of those voting.

For Senate Democrats, the inclusion of these obnoxious requirements is the equivalent of taking hostages. The tactic strikes me, however, as a pretty ordinary one for both sides of the aisle. The argument can be made that all legislation should address a single issue, to be voted up or down in a "clean" fashion. Indeed, this is the theory behind the often-proposed but never-approved line-item veto. I don't see it going anywhere, though. When the shoe is on the other foot, the attitude most often is that compromise is how the business of government is supposed to get done. I'm not sure it helps to characterize every compromise as taking one issue hostage for the purpose of getting concessions on another.

As things stand, the House approved continued funding for the FAA, which the Senate refused to take up. The Senate has not produced its own proposal, just as it refused until the very last minute to produce its own proposal to the hated House bill on the debt ceiling. Neither chamber is technically in recess this week, but that's only a gambit to prevent recess appointments, because legislators actually have all gone home. FAA workers are left hanging, but is it really because the Republican House has taken them hostage? Or is it because Senate Democrats can't bring themselves to adjust to the new reality that they can't pass legislation without real compromise?

The New Civil Discourse

The New Civil Discourse

"If the budget is balanced, the terrorists will have won."

I need that on a T-shirt.

8 Things Never

"8 Things You Should Never Say to Your Husband"

This is one of those pointless humanizing pieces that news agencies run more for entertainment than for serious reasons. Still, since we often talk about the relations between men and women -- or man and wife -- let's look at it.

They get off to a very bad start here: "One of the best parts about marriage is being so comfortable with your hubby that you can say just about anything to him. But if you don’t watch your mouth, sometimes the ugly truth comes out..."

So, these concepts are supposed to be truths that you shouldn't say to your husband. Ugly truths. About him.

1. "You're just like your father."

I don't know -- this one doesn't seem bad to me. I'd take it as a compliment, in large part because I know I'm not very much like my father (though we look alike); he's a better man than I am in many respects. Though he has his flaws, as all men do, overall I think of him as a shining example of what a good man is like: a volunteer firefighter, a loyal husband and father, a former staff sergeant and drill instructor in the US Army.

2. "When are you going to find a new job?"

Job-related questions are very touchy for any man in modern American society, because they get at the core role that society expects him to fulfill. Unhappily, questions about his job are going to be received by most American men as questions about his whole worth as a human being.

That's improper -- it is also philosophically out of order, as his essential nature is not related to his employment but to his ability to exercise virtue in a vigorous and rational way. Employment can be a way of doing that, or it can simply be a private struggle to provide yourself and your family with the means to exercise virtue in other spheres: as a thinker, or a writer, or a mountain-climber, a horseman, or -- for those with the calling -- a man of God.

Fixing that problem will make it much easier to talk about the employment issues. Once he is in order in his soul, the question of how he makes his living will be of far less importance. As it should be! What a waste of our lives, to focus as much as we do on what Elise likes to call the 'circular' business of just earning enough to get by.

3. "My mother warned me you'd do this!"

I would find this one intriguing. I would like to know what my wife's mother warned her about -- she was a very interesting lady, and I liked her a lot.

4. "Just leave it -- I'll do it myself!"

Since we're talking about the 'ugly truth,' the concept is going to be 'You're incapable of doing a good job here.' This need not be unpleasant to hear: I am always glad to discover that my wife would rather reorganize the pantry without my assistance. However, this certainly could be said in a hateful way, and anything that sounds like "Go away you incompetent idiot" will probably be received as the insult that it was intended to be.

5. "You always..." or "You never..."

Yes, this is wisely avoided in all circumstances, and for all audiences.

6. "Do you really think those pants are flattering?"

The likely answer: "How should I know?" Most men wear pants that conform to the kind of pants they were taught to wear at work or in the military. The question of whether they are "flattering" never enters either consideration: the question is whether they are the proper kind of pants for that environment. If I don't look good in them, it's very likely because I don't look all that good. We can't be blaming the pants for that.

7. "Ugh, are we hanging out with him again?"

I see the point, although in general married couples find it nearly impossible to remain actively engaged with single friends.

8. "Please watch the kids. But don't take them here, or do this, or forget that..."

There is a rule that will serve as a useful guideline for women dealing with men: "You can tell me what to do, or how to do it. Pick one."

There are exceptions, of course, but in general it's best to learn to let go and give your husband some autonomy in how he executes the tasks set for him. Or, if there is something you really need him to do in a particular way (say, you want the house painted, but it's important that it be painted green and not just any color he likes) you should probably find a way to convince him to do the task short of telling him to do it. "If you paint the house, then I'll..." is the kind of strategy that avoids telling him to do it, which means that (if he agrees to do it) you can give him very specific guidance on how you want it done without irritating him.

That, at least, is my advice; you may find that your own experience is otherwise. Feel free to say so in the comments!

Italian Sports

Italy: Home of the Coolest Sports

This seems like it would be fun.

What strikes me about a lot of these sports is that they've been reinvigorated recently -- this one in 1995. That's interesting.

A Pollster Who Gets It Right

A Pollster Gets It Right:

A left, or "center-left," pollster actually listens to what people are saying. It's fairly amazing to realize that they still can hear it, the ones who decide to listen.

[I]n smaller, more probing focus groups, voters show they are fairly cynical about Democratic politicians’ stands. They tune out the politicians’ fine speeches and plans and express sentiments like these: “It’s just words.” “There’s just such a control of government by the wealthy that whatever happens, it’s not working for all the people; it’s working for a few of the people.” “We don’t have a representative government anymore.”

This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy sidelines Democrats and liberalism....

GOVERNMENT operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless.

Not quite powerless. We can break it. That is what lies behind the Tea Party's "intransigence" on the debt ceiling: the firm conviction that it is better to destroy this system than to save it.

Read on:

Our research shows that the growth of self-identified conservatives began in the fall of 2008 with the Wall Street bailout, well before Mr. Obama embarked on his recovery and spending program. The public watched the elite and leaders of both parties rush to the rescue. The government saved irresponsible executives who bankrupted their own companies, hurt many people and threatened the welfare of the country. When Mr. Obama championed the bailout of the auto companies and allowed senior executives at bailed-out companies to take bonuses, voters concluded that he was part of the operating elite consensus. If you owned a small business that was in trouble or a home or pension that lost much of its value, you were on your own. As people across the country told me, the average citizen doesn’t “get money for free.” Their conclusion: Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.

Everything they witness affirms the public’s developing view of how government really works. They see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations, that makes these outcomes irresistible.

The list of recommendations for Democrats is refreshing; but it is important that Democrats recognize that the alternative is the end of the system. The public is done with it. Wall Street and Washington are alike, says Ms. Megan McArdle, in being mostly interested in 'what keeps the checks flowing' -- but that option is closed save in the shortest term. The system will reform fundamentally or, if that is too hard, it will burn. The end of the world is not too high a price to break an unjust system, for 'the end of the world,' on these terms, already has happened more than once.

For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.

For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.

For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.

If it comes to that, I shall abide it. For the moment, the establishment appears to have given itself one last chance. As they love their lives and fortunes -- I will not speak of their sacred honor -- they had better take care in how they spend it.

The Jacksonian Party has a more hopeful take on the whole business.

Baby Guards

Baby Guards

I'm thinking it would be a bad idea to make a threatening move toward this distant baby relative of mine -- a first cousin twice removed. I haven't seen my cousin (his grandmother) for many decades, but we keep in touch through Christmas cards and photos, recognizing in each other the true dog-madness.

Madness in Command

"Depression in Command"

An article in the Wall Street Journal challenges a fundamental idea that we use in choosing leadership, assigning security clearances, and indeed even in determining responsibility in the legal sense of the term. Maybe what we need in a leader is madness...

When not irritably manic in his temperament, Churchill experienced recurrent severe depressive episodes, during many of which he was suicidal. Even into his later years, he would complain about his "black dog" and avoided ledges and railway platforms, for fear of an impulsive jump. "All it takes is an instant," he said.

Abraham Lincoln famously had many depressive episodes, once even needing a suicide watch, and was treated for melancholy by physicians. Mental illness has touched even saintly icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom made suicide attempts in adolescence and had at least three severe depressive episodes in adulthood.

Aristotle was the first to point out the link between madness and genius, including not just poets and artists but also political leaders. I would argue that the Inverse Law of Sanity also applies to more ordinary endeavors. In business, for instance, the sanest of CEOs may be just right during prosperous times, allowing the past to predict the future. But during a period of change, a different kind of leader—quirky, odd, even mentally ill—is more likely to see business opportunities that others cannot imagine.

There's a lot of sense to the concept. However, we routinely engage in psychological screening of job candidates, especially for military or leadership positions. The only jobs we don't psychologically screen for are elected officials, many of whom do seem to experience some of the less productive forms of madness -- an intense focus on their own importance, for example. If the theory is right, these tests could be stripping out the very people best suited to military leadership in a genuine crisis. And why should we not believe that? Many generals, like Sherman or Grant, found a success in war that eluded their peacetime efforts: Sherman was a repeated failure, and Grant an alcoholic whose brilliance in maneuvering an army at war was not equaled when he became the leader of the bureaucracy during peacetime.

Maybe we should consider this a reason to vote for someone: that he, or she, is sensitive enough to reality to be depressed now and then!

Discourse

Modern Political Discourse:

"I'd rather be a hobbit than a troll," says one Congressman to another, in reference to the premier issue of political interest today.

Mainstreaming, indeed!

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?

Subscribe To