The New Dark Ages

Dad29's comment below points to this essay on the collapse of civilization, which dovetails with another piece I was reading today. Here is the substance of the complaint:

Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.... they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them....

Yet ours is a curious bleakness. Good things of everywhere and all time lie free for the having. When I was a child, you went to a library for books and the libraries often didn't have many. Today you can get even the Chinese classics, or those of Greece and Rome, or almost any book ever written in any language, from the web in five minutes. Do you want Marvin Minsky on finite automata? Papinian and Ulpian on Roman law? Balzac? Raymond Chandler? Tolkien? All are there. The same is true for any music, any painting, any movie, almost any historical curiosity: Ozzie and Harriet, Captain Video, Plastic Man. You can have cultivated friends in Kanmandu or Yuyuni in the Bolivian alitplano, and talk to them face-to-face with Skype.

This is a point that Eric Blair makes from time to time, and it's a good one. We have access to wonderful things; yet somehow the culture worsens rather than improves. The greatest music ever composed or performed is available almost free, or entirely free if it is on YouTube; and yet the music that fills the public space is among the worst. It is not that the subject matter is so often sexual, as some of the greatest poetry or plays are erotic. It is that they are banal. If they bother to attempt any actual poetry in their lyrics, it is unimaginative and dull. Only sometimes is there a melody, and if there is it shows no novelty (indeed, it is often sampled from some other song that the 'artist' happens to know). If the singer bothers with a melody, they certainly don't bother to hit the notes: that is done digitally. Increasingly they seem to try to cover the poverty of the music by trying to be flashy and transgressive with the visuals. 'Transgressivism' as a movement in the arts is a single joke with a single punch line. It might startle the first time it is encountered, but any repetition is grating rather than shocking. At this point it isn't even shocking the first time, because it has become so normal to have so-called artists insisting on trying to shock you. Here is the other article, which has to do with the 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical library.

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, one of the most remarkable publishing projects in modern history. Yet as with everything book-related in the year 2011, the Loeb centenary carries with it a touch of wistfulness, and an uncertainty about the future. For the Loeb classics are the monument of a book culture that now seems on the wane -- a culture that prized the making and owning of physical books, not just for the pleasure of turning the pages, but from a sense that the book was the natural, predestined vessel of every expression of human thought....

Over the years, the Loeb as physical object has become instantly recognizable to bibliophiles: uniform, small-format hardcovers, with green covers for the Greek titles and red for the Latin. So familiar and covetable are the Loebs that Harvard University Press recently marked the 100th anniversary by inviting readers to send in photographs of their collections. What makes such images tantalizing is their promise of completeness. There are now 518 volumes in the Loeb Classical Library -- just enough to make the idea of owning and reading them all seem an attainable challenge. The earliest authors in the Loeb catalog, Homer and Hesiod, wrote in the 7th century BCE; the latest, the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, wrote in the 7th century CE. Here, then, is 1,400 years of human culture, all the texts that survive from one of the greatest civilizations human beings have ever built -- and it can all fit in a bookcase or two.

I own several of these facing-page editions, which are wonderful for those who still wish to learn Greek or Latin. (Greek, alas, is quite beyond me -- I can only recognize certain words, so that I can distinguish which concept is being translated as "knowledge" or "spirit" or "soul," for example.) If you can pick them up cheaply, which is not so hard at a college bookstore that sells used books, it is usually worth doing. So we have these amazing treasures. How do we teach people to be interested in them? Does it matter that they are not?

The Debates

Rep. Bachmann's standing in the polls has eroded sharply since Gov. Perry entered the race. She is trying to position herself against Gov. Perry chiefly on two fronts, and she is right about one of them and wrong about the other. She is wrong to try to undercut him with seniors by talking up Social Security.

"Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America," says a Bachmann adviser. "Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it's an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives."

The chief difference between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security is that Ponzi couldn't force you to pay into it. The government is doing in the open what Ponzi had to do in secret, because they have the power to do it.

What is absolutely true, both for Social Security and Ponzi schemes, is that someone is going to get left holding the bag. We always hear that it should not be seniors, but really, it probably should be. The young are poorer than the old, for one thing. For another, it is the old who have sat by and let Congress get away with spending up the Social Security "trust fund" for a generation. The parents of the Baby Boomers were not fools, and neither were the Boomers themselves. Everyone knew what was happening, and they let Congress do it anyway.

It's a fine thing to tell a 20-something or a 30-something that they shall have to pay massive taxes their whole lives to support the retiring Baby Boomers and their parents, knowing they shall receive nothing when (if!) they are able to retire. It's even finer to tell them that when it is those same Baby Boomers and their parents who controlled the political system during the period of time when sound financial planning should have been made. Morally, the old are the ones most responsible for the current mess, and if anyone is to bear the weight of it, it should be them and not the young.

Social Security should be replaced with a system of poverty relief for those elderly who really are poor. We could afford to pay even more generous benefits for those who really cannot otherwise survive, if we gave up the idea of paying everyone something simply because they happen to be alive (and older than 65). While this would mean belt-tightening for middle-class retirees, and those soon to retire, it would be better than enslaving the young, reducing their lifetime earnings substantially in exchange for no possibility of any real support in their own age.

On this point, then, Gov. Perry is quite right, and Rep. Bachmann wrong.

She is right here:

The toughest attack on Rick Perry came not from Mitt Romney on Social Security, but from Michele Bachmann on his executive order requiring girls to be inoculated against the HPV virus. Bachmann got specific in charging Perry with "crony capitalism" because his former chief of staff was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company that made the vaccine. Perry manfully explained that parents could opt out of the immunizations, but Bachmann's charge packed an emotional and intellectual punch.

It is not just the "crony capitalism" piece that is right, although that is a strong point against Gov. Perry, and also Mr. Romney, the other frontrunner -- unless Rep. Bachmann pulls off an upset and wins the nomination, we shall have some flavor of crony-ist in the White House in 2013 (as President Obama is certainly one also).

She is also right, though, to defend the primacy of the family as a social unit. Another point that John Locke was wrong about is his assertion that we are naturally individuals. This is certainly not true: even on his chosen examples, it is clear that the family and not the individual is the unit that pre-exists the state. Recognizing the biological family's natural authority -- and the duty we owe both to our parents and our children -- would be of great benefit to our nation. A nation that believed in the fundamental role of the family would be less dependent on programs like Social Security, for one thing: for another, we would not be prone to the error of thinking of marriage as a kind of business partnership between the two married persons, which gives rise to easy divorce and other ills. We will be a healthier people when we return to recognizing it as a generational kinship bond that creates duties both to the previous generation and the one that is, hopefully, to follow from the union.

UPDATE:

Apparently Rep. Bachmann made some follow-up comments today that are factually wrong. The belief that vaccines cause autism and other forms of mental handicaps is a common one, but my understanding from having looked into the issue is that the accusations are not supported. It will be important to see how she handles the correction.

UPDATE:

The comments from the old post were good; I'm sorry they seem to have been lost. Joe raised a point about the importance of vaccinations in cases of epidemics which I agree with entirely. I think it is important for the family's natural authority to be a recognized force against which we balance the power of the state, just as the States were meant under the original Constitutional understanding to have independent power to balance the Federal government, and just as the legislature and the executive check and balance each other. Like the writ of habeas corpus, which cannot be set aside except in certain defined emergencies, the authority of the family should be a foundational feature of normal life. Setting it aside should be done only in cases where an exceptional interest requires it, as invasion might justify setting aside the writ of habeas corpus. The prevention of epidemics is surely on that scale.

Read side by side -

Read Side by Side -

In Michael Totten's latest essay, a photo of a senior Muslim Brotherhood member, with the characteristic bruised forehead. (Apparently this is a status symbol - you bash your head on the floor at prayer to prove how devout you are. Yeah, I know, big phylacteries and all that.)

In City Journal, an article on boxing that just went public, with a suggestion that one reason it fell off so much was public awareness of brain injuries from repeated head trauma. (A problem it shares even with soccer.)

Sins of Education

Dad29 sends an essay by Russell Kirk on the failings of our system of higher education as he encountered it during WWII. Let's run through his chief complaints and see how things stack up today.

There are four sins of public education: equalitarianism, technicalism, progressivism, and egotism. ...We have long been tending to reduce our educational problem to the lowest common denominator. In our anxiety to make equal those whom God created unequal, we have been as industrious, although not as successful, as was Colonel Colt. ...It does no harm for a teacher to lecture in a tone somewhat lofty for his average pupil; the dull student gains something, the average student is stirred to curiosity, and the intelligent student is pleased. This soldier never learned anything from men who came down to his level; admiration of knowledge, followed by emulation, is more effective. We talk of education for leadership; but actually we educate for mediocrity.

On the first count, things may be somewhat better at state colleges and universities than they are in the private schools. The four-year graduation rate at Harvard is 87%. At the University of Georgia, it is 54%, and at Georgia Tech it is 33%. I suppose Harvard might claim that its more selective nature means that it obtains better students, but in fact Harvard has an elaborate legacy program to permit admittance to the underqualified (especially the children of major donors). The better state schools are willing to see you fail, which means they aren't talking down to you. You'd better keep up.

...Our second curse, the popular acclaim of “practical” knowledge, of technical skills, the training of young people to minister to our comforts, is harmful not so much per se as it is incidentally; it occupies precious hours that once were given to literature, languages, and the story of the past... For manual and domestic acquirements, apprenticeship and practical experience still are the schools of greatest worth.

We are quite guilty on this point. If you look at the top degree fields in the three universities mentioned above, they are all technical skills or "ministering to our comforts," with the sole exception of Harvard's history program. Do we really need so many psychology majors? Is there really a benefit to an education degree, or a business administration degree? I've known many people with education degrees who would have been better served with a liberal arts degree in the field they were going to be teaching.

...The doctrines of the “progressive” movement in education are interestingly varied; but the assumption at the foundation of the progressivist system is that there is an easy way to learning.... Who heeds Aristotle and the Greek view of education: namely, that its object is to make man the master of his soul? John Dewey and the lesser gods that sport about him, composing the pantheon of the progressivists, ask, why exercise compulsion upon the school child? There is a very simple way to avoid compulsion: if the child doesn't like the multiplication table, let him scribble with crayons. The line of least resistance is the road to education, it is held; in consequence, the alphabet is flouted as much as possible, resulting in a splendid disregard of orthography; history and politics are metamorphosed into community civics; if a child finds Pilgrim's Progress a bit hard to read at first, give him something simpler. The notion that a student must learn by doing (act A Midsummer’s Night's Dream and not read Hamlet; play with numbered blocks, not stoop to old-fashioned tables of calculation)' is carried to such an extreme that even Bertrand Russell is alarmed...

This is very good advice, and a point on which we are quite guilty. It is possible to find teachers and a program that will carry you in the right direction, but you have to know to look for it. Most students will not know.

That egotism which is the fourth curse of our schools lies in the' unjustifiable conceit of a great many teachers. They call themselves liberal, and yet they shut their ears and eyes to all opinion but that which comes from “modern” and “progressive” sources; they prate of freedom, and yet make a closed corporation of their profession....

I haven't encountered this aspect myself, though I hear it often. It is true that almost every professor I have had has been a man or a woman of the left; it is certainly true that the numbers appear to prove that the academy is strongly leftist across the board. Nevertheless, I have not felt that any of them were close-minded, nor that I would be punished for holding different views. Perhaps I have been fortunate, but I must speak kindly of these men and women, who have done me much good.

I hope I have done them some good as well, by challenging their basic assumptions about reality -- assumptions which very much need challenging, on just the points Kirk raises. In fact it is probably time to re-examine the whole concept of the Enlightenment and the modern era, because many of our fundamental assumptions inherited from that period are simply wrong. It is not true, as John Locke taught us to believe, that equality is a pre-political, natural feature of the human condition: if equality exists, it exists only after the state is formed, within the space won by those who defend the walls. It exists only because people choose to believe in it and fight for it: those extraordinary people, who could have made themselves masters of that space, and instead used their power to make the weak their equals.

I do agree with another of Kirk's sentiments:

...If there be sacred cows in modern education, they are named psychology and sociology. It has become almost blasphemy to assail them. But any soldier who has been a year or two in barracks knows how little information psychology, that muddle of physiology and metaphysics, can give him concerning his fellow man or himself; and the man who has met the Japanese can laugh, if he lives, at the glib phrases of sociology, that jumble of history, economics, and sentiment.

It is distressing to realize that we are graduating so many people with degrees in just these worthless fields. Psychology is apparently the top field for UGA, and Sociology one of Harvard's top five. Still, the wheels of justice grind fine in their time. These things may not pass in a generation or two, but they will pass.

Dragonslaying

On 9/11, after a while, I turned off the televisions and went to an island in a river to write the poem I posted below.  This year, I rode to a wilderness.

The faithful steed on "Moonshiner 28," near where moonshiners fought a three-day gun battle with Federal revenuers trying to stop the whiskey trade.

The wilderness in question is the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness.  Alfred Joyce Kilmer was an American warrior-poet.  You may not recognize his name, but you know one of his poems.

He was killed in action in 1918, as part of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.  At the time, he was a volunteer scout under Wild Bill Donovan.  The VFW pushed Congress into naming this wilderness after him, and it is a true wilderness:  among the last true old growth forest in the Appalachian mountains.  Some of the trees are many hundreds of years old.  Most of them are fantastically big, the sort of trees you dream of when you read stories.  It is a fitting monument to a good man.  

Near the wilderness lives the Dragon.  It has killed many men and women since the year 2000, although not so many as Iraq or Afghanistan.  But I've been to Iraq, too.

Atop the Dragon's Tail.

Atop the Dragon's Tail.  The power lines come from the TVA's nearby dams, which use the artificial mountain lakes to generate a great deal of hydroelectric power.

I took up riding motorcycles just about a year ago.  I wanted to ride 20,000 miles in my first year, and ride the Dragon, which is among the most dangerous roads in America.  I won't quite make 20,000 miles -- I'm over 15,000, but I'm just not going to make the last few thousand.  I did get to slay the Dragon, though, riding from the wilderness into Tennessee and back.

110 Octane "Dragon Fuel."  The speed limit on the Dragon is never greater than 30 miles per hour; even for those of us who care little for speed limits, there are certain physical limitations.

Breakfast near the Dragon.

In addition to the Dragon on 129, and Moonshiner 28, there is the Cherohala Skyway -- a much gentler road, but a beautiful.  It links the Cherokee National Forest with the Nantahala.  The latter is a Cherokee word that means "land of the noonday sun."  In the valleys of this land, the sun appears only for a few hours a day.

A monument to two men who died of exposure a mile high near the skyway, in the early period of settlement.  Jugs of moonshine and winter nights were the deciding factors.  

I've spent a great deal of this time in the wilderness in thought, but I don't want to talk about the thoughts yet.  I just want to share a portion of the beauty of the place with you.  My only hope, this week, was to do that most ordinary thing that any Malorian knight might do:  ride into a wilderness, and seek adventure.

Ten Years Gone

I wrote this poem ten years ago today; for seven years, I have reposted it here on this date. A lot has changed since then. In coming days, perhaps we should talk about it; but for today, here is the poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Socrates vs. King of Sweden; Who ya gonna call?

Rick Lowry, of the National Review, has made a short but good homage to courage and the first responders of 9-11. In it he uses a quote that made me think of all you. This merry band loves its philosophy but also knows when the time is right for picking up a sword.

The esteem with which we naturally hold physical courage is deep-seated. Musing on this, the great English literary figure Samuel Johnson said, “Were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, ‘Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;’ and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, ‘Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;’ a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange.”

I had to laugh.

Striking faculty members at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus were informed by e-mail that their health-care coverage through the university has been canceled but that they could continue coverage at their own expense under the terms of the federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or Cobra.

Brian Harmon, the campus's public-relations director, said that the university stopped faculty members' health-care coverage when the strike began, on Wednesday, the first day of fall classes, because it is permissible to do so under the institution's policies on benefits. The coverage, he added, can be reestablished once the professors go back to their classrooms.

I want to see how long the strike lasts now.

Summer Fare

The Late Summer Fare:

There are an amazing number of things you can do with bay leaves. It is used in many kinds of cooking, as an astringent in bathwater, and to keep insects out of your dry goods.



Pico de gallo ("rooster's beak") is a good use of late-summer tomatoes and pepper, cilantro and spice.

Post Office

We're from the Post Office, and We're Here to Help

The Post Office's impending bankruptcy is much in the news. My husband ridicules them for their belief that the right response to a drop in their customer base is to raise prices. That would indeed be a crazy strategy if they were losing customers to direct competitors with similar price structures. The Post Office, however, is a statutorily protected monopoly. Monopolies routinely raise prices until they can cover costs, knowing that the government will keep their customers safe inside the walled compound.

The Post Office's problem, of course, is that its monopoly is not complete. It has growing competition, not only from companies like Federal Express or UPS but also from the Internet. So I wondered why it wouldn't be a good idea to let the Post Office jack up stamp prices until either they could meet their costs or they went out of business in favor of their alternatives. My husband reminded me that private couriers are required by law to charge more than the Post Office, so the Post Office's competitors never would enjoy the benefits of having their own prices begin to compare favorably with those of Uncle Sam.

Although I've often heard that the mail monopoly is a Constitutional imperative, mail delivery has not always been a government monopoly:

In the early 1800s private railroads and steamboats gave rise to private companies offering mail delivery services. The Private Express Statutes of 1845 put an end to that service between cities. Private companies still delivered within cities until the Postal Code of 1872 barred them from doing so.

Today [the article pertains to the 105th Congress and therefore presumably refers to the late 1990s] the USPS is a $55 billion per year operation employing approximately 800,000 workers. Nearly half of the mail handled by the Postal Service is advertisements. A little over 30 percent is business-to-business correspondence. Some 15 percent is household-to-business mail, that is, payment of bills. Only around 8 percent of the mail is household-to-household, such as letters and greeting cards sent between families and friends.

At present, "it is a federal crime for private suppliers to transport and deliver messages on pieces of paper or other material media and charge prices as low as those of the U.S. Postal Service."

The "Private Express Statutes" leave it to the Post Office to decide what kind of competition it will allow. In 1979 it began to allow private delivery of letters marked "extremely urgent." The private couriers must charge the greater of $3 or twice the USPS rate, so this part would have to change in order to permit true competition. There are exceptions for cargo. All exceptions to the mail monopoly are subject to stringent standards and to Post Office inspection. I was surprised to find that there are picky rules even to prohibit companies from using special message services, unless they pay postage to the USPS anyway, or unless they don't charge the recipient, though the rules permit the USPS to jack with them if "barter" or "goodwill" is detected in the process.

Have you ever wondered why the powers that be in the USPS system didn't move fast to prevent the loss of their business model to innovative data transmission systems like the telephone and the Internet? It turns out they did try, though fortunately, being bureaucrats, they were way too slow on the uptake:

The Postal Service, for example, has gone into the business of marketing prepaid phone calling cards for long-distance calls, competing with private firms. That competition of a government monopoly with the private sector is manifestly unfair. Postal facilities and assets were acquired through monopoly power. The USPS now uses those facilities and assets to compete with the private sector.

The USPS has begun renting out space in the parking lots of its post offices for the erection of commercial antennas for cellular phone transmissions and other uses. In addition to running afoul of local regulations, that constitutes more unfair competition with the private sector. The Postal Service pays no property taxes on its real estate, whereas a private provider of space for broadcast operations would be subject to taxes.

In the early 1980s the Postal Service expressed initial interest in extending its monopoly over the emerging e-mail market. Fortunately, it failed at that attempt. Now, however, it is developing services to put electronic postmarks on e-mail and to guarantee e-mail security since mail fraud and tampering are federal crimes. Yet there already are private encryption software and services. And, no doubt, as the USPS uses its federal protection to keep e-mail secure, federal regulation of e-mail will follow.

The monopoly exceptions for cargo and urgent letters have worked so well that I don't see how expanding the exceptions to include letters would do much harm. The justification for the monopoly too often turns to the question of how terrific an employer the Post Office is. It's starting to sound like just another public program that's valued for the paychecks and retirement benefits it generates rather than the function it performs.

ZOMBIE

ZOMBIE:

I'm not particularly offended by the Bachmann-Zombie portrayal, but I am a bit bemused by the idea that Uzis might be the road out of this. There aren't that many Uzis, all things considered; and even if there were, the target population doesn't know how to use them.

PSYOP are meant to be a little more directly effective, gentlemen. You're supposed to be able to measure the effect of the particular message. If the best you can do is that your followers are trying to find relatively rare Israeli submachineguns that they don't know how to use anyway, you're screwing up.

South & Solz

An Angel in Tellico Plains:

I passed by a public library today, and spent some time there with the works of Lewis Grizzard. I suppose some of you don't know him, but he was a man from Georgia who used to write for the newspaper. Though he was important to me, and to many others of the South, he was a simple man who was of no consequence to most; but once he broke a lance on someone who was.

TELLICO PLAINS, TENN. -- I had been days without a newspaper, locked away in a careless world of mountains, rivers, dirt roads, and a supply of Vienna sausage and sardines and a gift for which we can never offer enough gratitude: the saltine cracker.

God bless the saltine cracker, for it is constantly loyal in its service to enhance the flavor of even the barest edible. You could eat dirt with a packet of saltine crackers on the side.

I can’t go many days without a newspaper because I can’t go many days without certain information necessary to my peace of mind.

I need to make sure the world hasn’t been blown away, and I need to keep up with the Dodgers. In this rustic village, which is located a the foot of some mountains near the Tennessee North Carolina border, I purchased a newspaper and found the world still in one piece, which is more than I could say for the Dodgers.

Interest in the Dodgers is a carryover from my youth, but must a man have to explain every quirk of his character? The Dodgers, I read, have sunk to a lowly third. And the Giants, whom I hate, are still holding to first place. So help me Junior Gilliam, my favorite all-time Dodger, that can’t last.

My companion and I needed a hot breakfast, if for no other reason than to take a brief leave from the joys of saltines. We walked into a place in Tellico Plains that was a combination beer joint and restaurant, mostly beer joint. The regulars were already at their stations. A card game of some variety was in progress, and an old man in a hat played the game with a boy-child on his knee.

"You have grits?" I asked the lady.

"No grits," she said. She was missing some teeth. "I could fix you potatoes."

Where does it say an angel must have teeth?

Over eggs and country ham and fried potatoes—the kind that are round and thin—I read the rest of the newspaper. Carter this. Carter that. All hail Proposition 13. And a bearded man had made a speech in the Harvard Yard and had said some nasty things about our country. He made the speech in his native tongue, Russian.

The man, who has never been to Tellico Plains, Tenn., said we ought to eat dirt awhile because we have become fat and too interested in material goods, like nice places to live and motorboats. He said we are suffering from a "moral poverty."

He said if he could change his country, which would put him in jail if he went back to it, he wouldn’t use our country as a model.

I finished my breakfast and the newspaper, left a nice tip for the lady and walked out on the streets of Tellico Plains.

It was a gorgeous late spring day. Just beyond the fruited plain that surrounds the village was a mountain majesty more green than purple, but stunning nevertheless.

Passing by me were simple folk, dedicated to the day’s work and the simple pleasures. Most of them, I am sure, had never heard of the Harvard Yard, much less of the bearded, exiled Russian author who spoke there.

A pickup truck passed through town, its rear bumper bearing a message I don’t entirely agree with, but one I needed at the moment. The Dodgers were going badly and what the Russian said upset me.

"America," read the sticker, "love it or leave it."

But where would you go, Mr. Solzhenitsyn? Where would you go?

Terror & Slaughter

"...With Terror And Slaughter Return."

The Western Experience notes remarks by the CEO of Deutsche Bank, along with an assessment of the cost of the breakup of the Eurozone.

It is also worth observing that almost no modern fiat currency monetary unions have broken up without some form of authoritarian or military government, or civil war.

That's an inclusive "or," I believe.

New Business

New Business:

Apparently one can become a philosophical counselor now. This sounds like a great racket, which is why there is already a certification board that offers "level 2" "full certification," just like Socrates had.

I wonder how much you make as a philosophical counselor? I'd like to know how to set my rates.

Nano-Violins?

Now, If We Could Only Manufacture the World's Tiniest Violin . . . .

Nanotechnologists are learning to make machines out of single molecules. This molecule of butyl methyl sulfide anchors to a copper plate at the sulfide "axle" while a four-carbon (butyl) arm and a one-carbon (methyl) arm spin around the axle they share. Unlike previous molecular motors, which were powered by light or chemical reactions, this one is powered by electricity delivered at the point of a tiny scanning tunneling microscope. Scientists hope to line up similar molecules like cogwheels and let the whole mass of them rotate in sync. What will it be good for? We don't know yet, but someone's bound to think of something clever.

Climate and Its Uses

Climate and Its Uses

From Steven Hayward, an American Enterprise Institute fellow, at PowerLine:

The German newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung observed shortly before the Cancun summit last year: “The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” What prompted this conclusion was a candid admission from a UN official closely involved with the climate negotiations, German economist Ottmar Edenhoffer: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Mr. Hayward was quoting from his lengthier testimony to Congress here.

The Road Not Guessed

The Road Not Guessed

How often do we guess wrong what's over the horizon?

A lonely, impoverished Samuel Morse took up his interest in a code-transmitting electromagnetic telegraph rather late in life, in the middle of a desperate depressive crisis over the failure of his career as an historical painter and his inability to remarry after losing his wife a decade earlier in childbirth. At the age of 44 he was crushed by the low price commanded by his magnum opus, a large painting of the interior of the Louvre. A couple of years later he was crushed again by the failure to secure an important commission for paintings to be placed in the new United States Capitol Building, as well as by a humiliating defeat in a local election -- both setbacks perhaps attributable to his maniacal and highly publicized pursuit of anti-Catholic policies. Nearly bedridden by illness or depression, he turned to a gadget he had been tinkering with in his spare time:

The apparatus he had devised was an almost ludicrous-looking assembly of wooden clock wheels, wooden drums, levers, cranks, paper rolled on cylinders, a triangular wooden pendulum, an electromagnet, a battery, a variety of copper wires and a wooden frame of the kind used to stretch canvas for paintings (and for which he had no more use). The contraption was “so rude,” Morse wrote, so like some child’s wild invention, that he was reluctant to have it seen.

Morse quickly worked out a suitable code and solved enough technical difficulties to establish the device's suitability for long-distance communication. He then set about trying to get a patent and investors for development, with disappointing results for several more years.

Traveling to France to seek European government support for his invention, Morse slowly converted individuals to his vision without obtaining the substantial support he needed. A friend (who happened to be the American patent commissioner, visiting Paris) wrote:

I do not doubt that, within the next ten years, you will see electric power adopted, between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for purposes of correspondence, and men enabled to send their orders or news of events from one point to another with the speed of lightning itself . . . . The extremities of nations will be literally wired together . . . .

A Parisian English-language newspaper enthused: “This is indeed the annihilation of space.”

The good publicity nevertheless did not produce investors. In the end, Morse guessed correctly that he would do better to seek financing back in his home country. Just before he left, however, he met Louis Daguerre, another failed painter, who was exciting everyone with his new device for transferring images via a camera obscura to a canvas. Morse was enchanted with this improvement on the painterly tradition and predicted that “throughout the United States your name alone will be associated with the brilliant discovery which justly bears your name.”

Morse returned to the United States to experience rapid success. In 1844, at the age of 55, he tapped out his famous message "What hath God wrought?" over a 34-mile line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Four years later he remarried; he and his new wife produced four children, who accompanied their parents many years later on a triumphal visit to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. By that time, Western Union had laid 50,000 miles of telegraph line.

In 1982, Morse's painting of the interior of the Louvre sold for $3.25 million.

Really Hate Tea

Race and the TEA Party:

The headline reads "Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist." That's pretty aggressive; what's the evidence?

“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean-energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, wrote in his paper, “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”...

Like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Racism is, apparently, believing that blacks are just like everybody else?

There was a graduate student present, with a "working paper," who got closer.

Other academics saw other mechanisms at work. Emily McClintock Ekins, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, said tea partyers have more faith in the fairness of capitalism, which she said could explain their attitudes on race.

“This makes it less surprising that nearly all Tea Partiers believe that hard work, rather than luck, drives success. This might also explain their lower levels of racial empathy, as they are less aware for how opportunity may be different for particular groups of people,” she wrote in a working draft paper.

Perhaps the problem is that you aren't asking the right questions.

A fair number of supporters of the TEA Party are veterans, whose experience in the Army or the Navy supports the idea that hard work and dedication to duty are most of the answer. Not all of the answer, to be sure: the military has strong controls against overt displays of racism. While no system can rule over what may be hidden in the heart, these controls establish a ground in which black servicemembers do very well.

Most of corporate America has a similar system in place, if only to protect themselves from lawsuits. Without asserting either that racism is not a problem, or that controls of this type aren't necessary to level the playing field, it is nevertheless the case that success has been possible in this environment.

I say "has been" rather than "is" possible because the structural changes around this recession are only the leading edge of a decades-long reduction in American wealth that will accompany the aging of our society. I don't know that upward mobility remains possible for large swathes of society, though exceptional individuals will do well.

The general decline in prosperity will also cut into both tax-funded professions, like the military, which will limit the degree of opportunity available in organizations with those kinds of strict anti-racist controls discussed above. That may have a negative effect on blacks particularly. It will also tend to be disruptive of small businesses, which is the means for independent wealth generation that doesn't depend on other people 'giving you a chance.' That's going to be hard on all of us.

The one group that is likely to remain profitable are the large corporations, who will use their power to cut special deals for themselves. These environments are likely to have the strong anti-racist controls, but they are also likely to be exploitative on other terms. Those familiar with the history of the South will recognize a number of the business practices of the Monsanto corporation, especially in India; much the same loan practices were used by Northern banks after the Civil War to turn free farmers who had owned their own land into sharecroppers or tenet farmers.

Does that constitute an abiding faith in the fairness of capitalism? Not really; it constitutes an abiding faith in small business and the military, I suppose, combined with a populist attitude about what Ms. Palin was calling "crony capitalism" just the other day.

If Ms. Palin is speaking about it, it's on the minds of a lot of the TEA Party. That should be expected: the movement was spurred in large part by outrage over the bank bailouts, wherein ordinary Americans who made bad investments lost their homes, while banks who had profited wildly on those same investments were paid off at taxpayer expense. The TEA Party movement is as populist as it is capitalist. The failure of political scientists to understand the distinction suggests to me that they don't even know what questions to ask; they are too distant from the movement to know how to begin understanding it.

En Passant

En Passant:

Sometimes, like the chess move where a pawn moves in an unusual and oblique way, it is the smallest things that move the game. Amongst Ms. Dowd's many complaints about the administration, notice what she says about his ray of hope.

Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as disrespectful.

That is a fascinating claim. She doesn't argue for it, which suggests that she thinks it will be self-evident.

What does it mean to say that your re-election will depend on portraying your opponents as disrespectful? It suggests that he won't be running on his record, for one thing; but that's small by comparison to the substance of what she is claiming here. What she is claiming is that he might win re-election, if he can demonstrate that Republicans haven't been adequately respectful of him.

If that were true, it isn't because his campaign will look like this:




Actually, that would be a pretty entertaining campaign.

Still, it is likely that what she means is something other than that. What she means is that the President's hopes depend on a fervent demand that he be treated with kid gloves. The deference isn't earned -- she clearly doesn't respect him -- but it will be commanded, on the strength of... what?

Of course, the New York Times has failed to understand the President's mind more or less consistently; just because this seems like a viable plan to them doesn't mean that he's so foolish himself. Respect must be earned, with Presidents as with any one else. Just getting elected to the office gets you some -- you can use the Rose Garden and Air Force One, and you can demand that Congress show up for your campaign commercials, as Ms. Dowd herself points out.

If the languid Obama had not done his usual irritating fourth-quarter play, if he had presented a jobs plan a year ago and fought for it, he wouldn’t have needed to elevate the setting. How will he up the ante next time? A speech from the space station?

Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.

The only thing she's wrong about is the idea that a joint session of Congress is a sacred occasion. It's a special occasion, but quite purely secular.

Hypotheticals

Hypotheticals:

If you should ever be sitting on your front porch in the dusk, smoking a long-stemmed pipe that a friend sent you because he knew you liked cigars and Tolkien -- and you should hear rustling and squeaking behind the decorative window shutters on your house -- it is probably bats getting ready to come out to hunt.

Furthermore, if there should happen to be any nearby children, you should call them over and tell them to watch the shutters. Then, you should puff up a big bunch of smoke from your pipe, and blow it behind the shutter. A few seconds letter, the children are likely to be very impressed.

NASCAR

NASCAR v. POTUS:

One thing we've probably learned over the last few years is that NASCAR fans are more likely than not to dislike the President. This was most obvious during Car & Driver's April Fools Day joke, which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

A Car and Driver April Fool's hoax on the Web, reporting President Obama had ordered Chevrolet and Dodge out of NASCAR after the 2009 season, turned into a sizzling Internet topic Wednesday.

"Just when we thought we could take a breather from Barack Obama's wacky policies, he reached across the Atlantic today to drop another one on us," wrote Sandra Rose at Rightfielders.com. "Naturally, NASCAR fans are outraged."

Naturally. It wasn't true, of course. The President hadn't said anything about NASCAR; when he finally got around to saying something, four months later, it was on the importance of the sport to America's automobile industry.

Why would NASCAR fans have believed the hoax? Probably because it fit so well with the takeover of the automobile industry; the electric/hybrid car push; the 'slim down' anti-obesity crusade; the 'slim down' anti-carbon-footprint crusade; etc, etc., etc. Too, then-Senator Obama turned down a NASCAR club that wanted his campaign to sponsor their car. In other words, the joke was highly plausible: NASCAR fans probably feel that the joke better represents the truth of the President's feelings for them than the fact that he is a wise enough campaigner to do some minimal pandering in their direction.

When we learned today that half the NASCAR drivers invited to meet the President declined the offer, then, few can have been very surprised.

There seems to be a debate about the etiquette of turning down a Presidential invitation, however. Jeff Gluck says it's not very patriotic to claim to be too busy to meet with the President. The Western Experience agrees, proving that this is not just a partisan position.

The American Thinker isn't buying it:

As for Gluck's "patriotism" shot - is he really equating patriotism with being an extra in a campaign commercial for a candidate they don't support?

My own sense is that the President isn't the Queen, and Americans aren't his subjects: any President is meant to be no more than primus inter pares. You may decline an invitation with him on the same terms as with any other equal.

Those terms are that you can decline with no more than a note declaring that you regret you cannot accept the invitation: no explanation is required. No one in NASCAR seems to have done otherwise. I would say, then, that they have acted politely. A free citizen is not required to appear at the President's pleasure. It is not rude for him to state that he has other business that, regretfully, must detain him.

Dumb Law

Another Dumb Law:

I hope none of you in California ever use babysitters.

Dubbed the babysitting bill, AB 889 would require families to provide nannies and sitters (anyone over 18 who cares for your child except one of your other children) with lunch and rest breaks, minimum wage, worker's compensation, paid vacation, and overtime pay. Families who fail to provide these things could be sued.

So pretty much forget ever going on a date night again, and as for us working moms -- we're totally screwed.... The rest breaks in particular are just ridiculous because that means someone else would have to come in and cover for their breaks every two hours. If you're a parent, you know how hard it is to find one good sitter, much less two; good luck finding one who's willing to work for 15 minutes at a time.

Good luck finding a teenager who's willing to work for 15 minutes in total, in my experience; but perhaps you've had better luck.

Secular

Speaking of Errors:

Iran unhappy with Made-in-China Korans.

Iran's Organization of the Holy Quran is scolding Iranian publishers who've outsourced production of the holy book to Chinese printers.
Apparently, their copies of the Quran are riddled with typos, according to the Tehran Times.

"These tableaus are made quite cheaply in China but are sold for much more than they are really worth to make that much more profit," said an official with the organization who monitors and evaluates Qurans available in Iran.

The official even urged importers to halt future Quran shipments from China, the Times reported.

I can't imagine why an atheist country would produce slapdash copies of sacred texts. It's like they don't even care.

Jim

Oh, You Meant Mr. Crow:

I don't have it in me to even be annoyed by this sort of lazy paranoia. However, I'm amused by CNN's editor.

"Some of these folks in Congress would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree," Carson said, according to the audio....

Tea party officials have previously renounced characterizations that their movement is racist.

"Renounced"? How did that get past them?

Brains, Bodies, and Symbiosis

Brains, Bodies, and Symbiosis

Until quite recently, I've always been Hygeia's darling, particularly when it comes to digestive health. The usual problems of that kind were things I merely heard about in other people's lives. Unfortunately, it seems I have now developed an auto-immune disorder associated with digestive difficulties, which luckily is well-controlled with not-outrageously-priced medication. The whole experience has piqued my interest in what all those gazillions of gut flora are up to in there.

The most recent article to catch my eye was on my newly discovered favorite site, Not Exactly Rocket Science. People are publishing interesting articles about the role of gut flora not only in digestion but in the immune response and even mood. One study found that

mice, after regularly eating Lactobacillus, were more likely to spend time in the exposed parts of a maze (a common test for anxiety symptoms) than those who ate bacteria-free meals. They were also less likely to drift motionlessly when plopped into water (a common test for depressive symptoms).

I'm eating a lot of yogurt myself now, and am wondering whether I would behave differently if plopped down into the middle of a maze, or a deep body of water. Speaking of which, does it seem like a good idea to send National Guardsmen into deep water if they can't swim? I thought at first it was a matter of heavy clothing and boots, but this fellow's companion swam after him like a champ once he started going down. That looked dicey.



Back to gut flora and mood: evidently it's the vagus nerve, connecting the gut to the brain, that transmits the influence. Sever the vagus nerve in mice, and their guts no longer affect their behavior.

Some speculate that we eventually will learn how to treat mood disorders with probiotics. All I know is that they seem to work well on my gut. Some combination of the medication I'm now on, and the probiotics, certainly have eliminated the chronic fatigue that dogged me all last spring: gone like flipping a light switch. Of course, it may just be that the intestinal inflammation is controlled and I'm absorbing nutrients better. Still, even my somewhat skeptical gastroenterologist believes there's some good clinical evidence implicating gut flora imbalances in flare-ups of this condition. I guess I'll take my chances with the probiotics for the time being, especially since it's pretty clear they can't hurt me.

So my small passengers and I seem to do each other considerable good, and we do well to keep each other in a happy mood.

The Constitutional Right to Denial

The Constitutional Right to Denial

A federal district judge in Dallas has just struck down a Texas law requiring a physician to supply a pregnant woman with detailed information about the development of her fetus before aborting it, including a sonogram and a heartbeat recording. The court's reasoning is obscured in a maze of multi-pronged standards concerning strict scrutiny and compelling interests, but it boils down to a conviction that pregnant women should not be forced to confront irrelevant information that might distress them.

Before enacting the recent sonogram bill, Texas law had employed an ordinary informed-consent procedure based on written materials, of a sort that had been expressly approved by the Supreme Court in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The new sonogram law, however, provoked two legal challenges, both of which were upheld at least in part. First, the court struck down certain parts of the statute on grounds of vagueness. Second, it struck down certain parts on the ground of an inversion of traditional First Amendment rights: the citizen's right to freedom from unwanted messages, as upheld by the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Hill v. Colorado, which involved limitations on the rights of abortion protesters to accost potential patients in or near a clinic.

On the vagueness front, the court began by noting tartly that, from the number of words the plaintiffs found objectionable, it was hard to imagine they shared a language with the bill's drafters. Nevertheless, the court agreed that a number of provisions were unconstitutionally vague, such as a reference to "the doctor who is to perform the abortion," the requirement to explain the sonogram and heartbeat in a manner intelligible to a layperson, certain details about how permitted waivers would operate to excuse the doctor and the pregnant woman from confronting the uncomfortable facts about her fetus, and followup obligations to supply the woman with additional information about such matters as the availability of suits to establish paternity and obtain child support. If these provisions are unconstitutionally vague, it's hard to imagine how any statute passes muster. (The court suggests that the Constitution prohibits "gotcha tactics" in a statute, which would be great news if any such approach ever were to be consistently applied.) But this is a garden-variety results-oriented specimen of judicial activism employed to strike down a law the judge makes it plain he objects to on ideological grounds :

The Court has grave doubts about the wisdom of the Act . . . . The Act’s onerous requirements will surely dissuade or prevent many competent doctors from performing abortions, making it significantly more difficult for pregnant women to obtain abortions. Forcing pregnant women to receive medical treatment from less-skilled providers certainly seems to be at odds with “protecting the physical and psychological health and well-beingof pregnant women,” one of the Act’s stated purposes. . . . In short, if the Texas Legislature wishes to prioritize an ideological agenda over the health and safety of women . . . .

But the "vagueness" analysis is not the most troubling aspect of the decision. The most troubling aspect surely concerns the principle of freedom of speech. As the plaintiffs argued:

The Act violates the plaintiff physicians’ right of free speech by using them as puppets to convey government-mandated speech (visual, verbal, and auditory) to a patient who does not wish to receive that information and who does not believe it material to her decision. This mandated speech falls outside accepted medical practice for informed consent and requires physicians to violate basic tenets of medical ethics. This unprecedented intrusion on a physician’s relationship with a patient in a private medical setting violates the First Amendment.

The Dallas court agreed that the Texas statute violates the First Amendment rights by compelling the speech of doctors to pregnant women.

Defenders of the statute argued that the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Casey permits "compelled speech" in the context of informed consent to a medical procedure, where the statutory requirements are narrowly tailored to advance the government's compelling interest (a traditional strict-scrutiny constitutional analysis). The Supreme Court recognized

a substantial government interest justifying a requirement that a woman be apprised of the health risks of abortion and childbirth. It cannot be questioned that psychological well-being is a facet of health. Nor can it be doubted that most women considering an abortion would deem the impact on the fetus relevant, if not dispositive, to the decision. In attempting to ensure that a woman apprehend the full consequences of her decision, the State furthers the legitimate purpose of reducing the risk that a woman may elect an abortion, only to discover later, with devastating psychological consequences, that her decision wasnot fully informed. If the information the State requires to be made available to the woman is truthful and not misleading, the requirement may be permissible. . . . [W]e permit a State to further its legitimate goal of protecting the life of the unborn by enacting legislation aimed at ensuring a decision that is mature and informed, even when in so doing the State expresses a preference for childbirth over abortion. In short, requiring that the woman be informed of the availability of information relating to fetal development and the assistance available should she decide to carry the pregnancy to full term is a reasonable measure to ensure an informed choice, one which might cause the woman to choose childbirth over abortion. This requirement cannot be considered a substantial obstacle to obtaining an abortion, and, it follows, there is no undue burden.

In the new decision, however, the Dallas court escaped this rather strong language by observing that the statutory attack in Casey was based on Fourteenth Amendment "due process" rights (i.e., freedom from "undue burdens") rather than First Amendment "compelled speech" restrictions. The Dallas court also noted that "important," "legitimate," and "substantial" interests were not necessarily "compelling," and that under Roe v. Wade the state's interest in protecting a fetus did not arise until the fetus was viable. The court did acknowledge the state's compelling interest in ensuring the informed consent of patients undergoing medical procedures, and it approved the state's decision to make some information available to the pregnant woman. Where the court balked was at the requirement to include in the disclosure a number of uncomfortable details:

[T]he Act under consideration here requires physicians to provide, in addition to those legitimate disclosures, additional information such as descriptions of “the presence of cardiac activity,” and “the presence of external members and internal organs” in the fetus or embryo. The Court does not think the disclosures required by the Act are particularly relevant to any compelling government interest. . . . The net result of these provisions is: (1) a physician is required to say things and take expressive actions with which the physician may not ideologically agree, and which the physician may feel are medically unnecessary; (2) the pregnant woman must not only passively receive this potentially unwanted speech and expression, but must also actively participate. . . . In the absence of a sufficiently weighty government interest, and a sufficiently narrow statute advancing that interest, neither of which have been argued by Defendants, the Constitution does not permit such compulsion.

I confess an inability to understand how someone can "ideologically disagree" with a picture of arms and legs, or with a recording of a fetal heartbeat. To my way of thinking, this is the crux of the decision, and it rests entirely on this judge's personal conviction that the presence of fetal arms, legs, and heartbeat are not "particularly relevant" to a pregnant woman's informed consent to an abortion. It's an awful lot of words just to come to the conclusion that people have a right to live in denial. The Dallas judge has ruled that pregnant women must not be confronted with the very information that might help them conclude whether the medical procedure they are contemplating involves another human life, or instead is as ethically neutral as blowing one's nose.

Epic

Epic:

In the 15th century, when Europeans first began moving people and goods across the Atlantic, a... stowaway somehow made its way to the caves and monasteries of Bavaria.

The stowaway was a kind of yeast, which fused with the traditional European yeasts to allow you to ferment a new kind of beer. That beer, lager, is now among the most popular drinks in the world.

It's a good drink for an August afternoon, at least in the Northern hemisphere.

Discontented Science

Discontented Science:

Bryan Fischer's writing appeared once before on these pages, when he was arguing that grizzly bears should be eradicated if they threaten even one human life. I wasn't especially impressed with that argument.

Now he has penned what he apparently takes to be a refutation of Darwin. Darwin wasn't interested in most of the problems he raises, however, so it might be better said to be a broad attack on the secular worldview, which often considers itself to be firmly rooted on scientific theory.

There's a rebuttal here, which contains some important points, but which hardly attains the tone one would expect from a defender of dispassionate science. This is not exactly the Leibniz-Clarke debate on substantivalism versus relationism as the proper foundation for physics. No one will be reading this debate for insight into the question in a hundred years, let alone three hundred.

There is one problem that they touch on that very well may be of interest in that timeframe, though: the problem of the creation of the universe. (And why shouldn't it remain of interest a few more centuries, given its track record? The first sentences of Aristotle's Metaphysics point us toward it.)

Stephen Hawking published an article last year that continues to bother me in the fashion of a thorn that has burrowed under the skin. After starting off appropriately with Viking mythology -- always a good start -- he wrote:

In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.

To say that "the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing" is to say something that is not, strictly speaking, true. If these laws "allow" effect X (say, the appearance of the universe), then there is not nothing -- there are, at least, these laws. They have to be in effect already in order to produce the effect attributed to them. Where did they come from? How are they sustained in such a way that they produce many universes "with different laws"? Apparently they must not be laws of the type that might be "different" under another system, as they must predate the creation of each system on this model. What sustains them in the time described as "nothing"?

Phrase it another way, friendlier to Hawking, and just say that the universe is such a thing that it can arise from nothing. Even now, though, we still don't have nothing. We have something: specifically, we have the latent potential of a universe coming to be. That's very different from nothing.

The question physics is capable of answering here is, "What triggered that potential to execute itself in the particular way we can observe?" If the answer is "gravity" or "quantum mechanics," an account of 'what they were doing before creation' is going to be just as troubling for the physicist as it was for St. Augustine.

Even so, it doesn't answer the real question, which is: How did such a potential come to exist? You exist because you got your existence from something that already existed -- your mother and father, perhaps. What was the thing that already existed that gave existence to this potential for creation?

Mr. Hawking hasn't answered the question at all. I fear to say, given my respect for his intelligence and accomplishments, that he may not have understood just what the question really was.

Archaeology

King Arthur's Round Table Discovered by Archæologists:

It's good they're still looking for it, anyway.

Historian John Harrison, chair of the SLHS, who initiated the project, said: "Archaeologists using remote-sensing geophysics, have located remains of a circular ditch and other earth works beneath the King's Knot.

"The finds show that the present mound was created on an older site and throws new light on a tradition that King Arthur's Round Table was located in this vicinity."

Stories have been told about the curious geometrical mound for hundreds of years -- including that it was the Round Table where King Arthur gathered his knights.
Around 1375 the Scots poet John Barbour said that "the round table" was south of Stirling Castle, and in 1478 William of Worcester told how "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle".

Sir David Lindsay, the 16th century Scottish writer, added to the legend in 1529 when he said that Stirling Castle was home of the "Chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round".

It has also been suggested the site is partly Iron Age or medieval, or was used as a Roman fort.

Some of you may remember that just last year, the Round Table was discovered by historians in Chester. It's become as hard -- or as easy -- to find the Round Table as it is to find the Holy Grail.

Hurricanes

Hurricanes:

Although my experience with hurricanes is less than Tex's, I've done both the ride-out and the evacuation. I slept through Isabel, except for a couple of occasions when the house I was in leaned over far enough in the wind to wake me up. It didn't fall, though, so I went back to sleep.

(More interesting than the storm was the commute that day. I was in D.C. for work, at the Pentagon as I recall, and stayed until the Metro was being shut down. I caught the last train out of town, and then when I got to the end of the train line, I found that they were no longer running buses on schedule, but as-needed. So, instead of catching my usual bus and then walking home a few blocks from the closest bus stop, the bus service gave me my own bus and dropped me off at my front door. That's service!)

Hurricane Floyd, when they gave the evacuation notice, was the size of Texas and a "very strong" Category 4. It weakened substantially before it made landfall, though, and the damage to our home in Savannah was not severe.

I suspect that Grim's Hall readers are likely to be prepared for anything, as you seem like a resourceful and self-reliant lot. I'll just repeat the usual advice that you always hear. If you're going to evacuate, go early and take the back roads. If you're going to stay, be sure you have bleach (a few drops in a gallon of water will sterilize it for drinking), a good knife, and adequate preserved food, preferably canned as it won't be ruined if it gets soaked. I'm sure you've made all the other sensible precautions that are appropriate to yourselves, such as obtaining any prescription drugs you might need, etc.

Good luck to all of you in the storm's path! If you survive, tell us any good stories that come out of the storm. We'll be glad to hear them, and from you.

The Greatest Storm

"The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time."

Now here's an account that would satisfy even the voracious appetite of the news channels, who dearly love a storm: Daniel DeFoe on a great storm that struck England in 1703:

The human toll was substantial: 123 dead in and around London and an estimated 8,000 drowned at sea, including about one-fifth of the sailors in the queen's navy. The physical wreckage was equally immense, with 800 houses flattened, 400 windmills demolished and the newly built Eddystone Lighthouse, off England's southern coast, washed away. Whole forests blew over. On a tour of Kent, Defoe started to count the fallen trees but quit at 17,000, having grown "tired with the Number."

H/t Maggie's Farm.

"It Can't Happen Here"

"It Can't Happen Here"

The news this weekend is saturated with public officials calming urging people to evacuate in the path of Hurricane Irene. I've lived on the Gulf Coast all my life and am familiar with the drill: do we go this time, or do we stay? When we lived in Houston, the obvious answer always was to stay; we were 50 miles inland at 50 feet of elevation, so the winds were extremely unlikely to be truly dangerous and there was no realistic chance of storm surge damage. It's no picnic to suffer through downed trees, weeks of power outages, and widespread roof leaks combined with shortages in both workers and construction materials, but it's often a sensible choice to stay behind and try to keep the damage under control in person. The deadly Hurricane Rita travesty in 2005 (100 killed) was an object lesson in how much worse an unnecessary evacuation can be than the actual effects of the storm.

Now we live within a couple of miles of the coast at only 17 feet of elevation. We take evacuation notices very seriously, even though we know that an evacuation almost certainly will turn out to be needless. The problem, of course, is that a hurricane causes bad but tolerable damage within a very broad path -- and potentially catastrophic damage within a narrow and unpredictable ribbon. By the time you know where ground zero is going to be, it's far too late to evacuate. Even so, we think very seriously about staying behind unless a storm is quite large and very likely to make a direct hit. The storm shutters go up, and then we hesitate until the last hour that we can be sure the roads won't be under water, in this very flat stretch of Gulf Coast where you have to go quite far inland before achieving any noticeable elevation. We make reservations several days in advance at an inland hotel that will accept numerous large and small animals. In six years here, we've bugged out once, aborted one bug-out at the last minute, and put up storm shutters a couple more times just in case.

Here's garden-variety hurricane damage that you'd like to stick around and fix up yourself while you guard your house and your neighborhood against looting:

Here's utter destruction that left a lot of people realizing in their last moments of life that they'd made a horrible mistake (that one house left standing used to be in the middle of a neighborhood before Ike hit the beach town of Gilchrist):

Interviews with people who barely survived the worst part of a hurricane show a set of consistent reasons why they didn't evacuate when there was still time:

(1) They couldn't bear to leave their animals behind but hadn't made adequate advance arrangements to take them along.

(2) They had weathered storms before, though the simple good luck of not being in the direct path of the worst damage, which drops off dramatically away from the eye-wall. They couldn't believe they'd be right in the shotgun barrel this time.

(3) They didn't fully take in the knowledge of how fast the water comes up in a storm surge and how quickly it makes the evacuation routes impassable. In the 1900 Galveston storm, the water was said to rise four feet in four minutes.

(4) They couldn't comprehend the night-and-day difference between pretty high winds that most buildings will survive handily, on the one hand, and a storm surge and debris wall that would come through their neighborhoods like a giant bulldozer.

None of these things are easy to take seriously if you live in an area where hurricanes are rare. People move around all the time and don't necessarily have family members or good friends with vivid memories of the last disaster from a generation back. I worry about the East Coast, where hurricanes hit just seldom enough to leave the population vulnerable in its attitudes. New York City is likely to be a real mess, flooded and bereft of power and transportation. Their public officials seem to be doing an excellent job of preparation, but that's an awful lot of people packed into a small area, very few of whom really understand in their bones what could be coming. But it's not a very big storm nor packing a huge storm surge, so with luck things won't be too awful.

The truth is, I love hurricanes as long as no one's getting killed. Maggie's Farm quotes Walker Percy on the subject today:

It was his impression that not just he but other people felt better in hurricanes . . . . The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff. They were able to talk. It was best of all when the hurricane’s eye came with its so-called ominous stillness. It was not ominous. Everything was yellow and still and charged up with value.

Hank

I Don't Think Hank Did It This Way:

Have a good weekend.

UPDATE: For Mr. Blair, who likes Cowboys and Aliens, a recording from the same era as the old Waylon Jennings song.



It's authentic. At least, Joe Meek did both cowboys...



...and aliens.

Microbial Warfare

Microbial Warfare

I recommend this "Not Rocket Science" article about a possible new approach to the control of mosquito-borne dengue fever. It's brief, but paints a vivid picture of some clever, flexible, and ethical thinking about how to design a more specific weapon than a broadcast pesticide. Some Australian scientists figured out a way to infect dengue-carrying mosquitos with a bacterium that attacks the dengue virus without much harming the mosquito. Before they settled on the final technique, they learned some clever tricks from the bacterium itself:

Wolbachia is transmitted in the eggs of infected females, so it has evolved many strategies for reaching new hosts by screwing over dead-end males. Sometimes it kills them. Sometimes it turns them into females. It also uses a subtler trick called “cytoplasmic incompatibility“, where uninfected females cannot mate successfully with infected males. This means that infected females, who can mate with whomever they like, enjoy a big advantage over uninfected females, who are more restricted. They lay more eggs, which carry more Wolbachia.

The scientists dreamed up a new approach of their own, too, in the form of

a strain that halves the lifetimes of infected females. Only older mosquitoes can transmit dengue fever because it takes several weeks for the virus to reproduce in the insects’ guts. If you knock off the older ones early, you could slash their chances of spreading disease.

That last gambit was not the one they settled on. Ultimately they got a line of mosquitoes going that would carry a Wolbachia strain that somehow killed off the dengue virus right in the mosquito gut. The bacterium can't be transmitted from adult to adult mosquito, though, only through offspring. So the scientists needed to release infected mosquitoes into a native population and let them breed.

Now this part is really interesting, I think. The scientists really wanted to test the new mosquitoes in Viet Nam, where dengue fever is endemic. Instead, they persuaded their neighbors in Queensland to be the first guinea pigs, even though the results would be harder to judge there because dengue fever outbreaks are only intermittent. They reasoned that they could not expect the Vietnamese to trust them to run the experiments there if they had not been willing to try them in their own backyard. As it turned out, the experiments in Queensland were quite successful in showing that an entire mosquito population can be quickly converted to Wolbachia carriers without ill effects. Now the team is headed to Viet Nam to see if they can show real progress in fighting dengue outbreaks.