At the Feed and Seed

We went by the Feed and Seed today to buy wormer for the horses.  While we were there, Ms. Grim was asking them if they would get peanuts in, because she thought she might try them for her garden next year.  The shop owner avowed he thought he might have some in the spring, if she wanted to come back.

"Will they grow well?" she wanted to know.

"Oh, peanuts grow well in Georgia," he said.  "Especially down in South Georgia.  Jimmy Carter made peanut farming famous."

Now that's a perfect intro, I thought, so I said, "I hear that Herman Cain is from Georgia, too."

"Is that right?" the owner said.

"Who's Herman Cain?" the wife asked.

The owner said, "He's a presidential candidate.  You need to know his name, because he's the one you need to vote for if he gets on the ballot."

This is a farm supply shop in a rural county in North Georgia, which produces mostly timber and cattle.  If Herman Cain has won the hearts of these people, there is no reason he can't be President.

Empathy and its Discontents

"Empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation," which raises some concerns about its value.  Americans are really good, these days, at feeling bad for you.  Does that mean they will help you?

As Steven Pinker writes in his mind-altering new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” we are living in the middle of an “empathy craze.” There are shelfloads of books about it: “The Age of Empathy,” “The Empathy Gap,” “The Empathic Civilization,” “Teaching Empathy.” There’s even a brain theory that we have mirror neurons in our heads that enable us to feel what’s in other people’s heads and that these neurons lead to sympathetic care and moral action.

You can read a much more in-depth account of Dr. Pinker's new work here.  What strikes me most about his assertions is how carefully he has pruned some of the graphs.

The first graph is pruned by showing a mean but not a mode; the 20th century graph is pretty much on the line with what the mode would be.  If you take "Europe and the US in the 20th century," and plot it against an average that is distorted by just a few of the graphs to the left, it looks like there has been substantial change.  If you take "the 20th century" as a whole, and plot it not against the average but the mode, it looks like there is no significant change.  The "100 Worst Wars and Atrocities" chart offers a hint as to why:  there is a strong clustering of the "worst"-ever things as you approach our present time.

Likewise, the "Deadliness of War" graph is strangely constructed by having a flat number of people killed.  The population has increased so much over the time frame, though, that the change makes a hash of the assertion.  There is a huge difference in a nation losing 10,000 people when it has a population of 30,000 versus 300,000 versus 300,000,000.  Note also that the scale on the graph is logarithmic, which makes the spike in the 20th century seem like a far smaller change than it really is:  if you drew this same thing on an normal scale, the Thirty Years War would look like a blip beside WWII.

As always, I doubt these claims of "progress" in human nature.  Cultures change over time, yes; but assuming you have an ordinary prejudice toward your own values, any period in history will be able to draw a chart showing "progress" of this type.  After all, humans learn culture from interaction with each other; and we have more interaction with those humans who are closer to us than those further away.  This is true in both space and time.  Therefore, of course it looks like periods of time further away from us are less like us than closer periods; and of course you can draw graphs that appear to show lines on scales going in a consistent direction.

That doesn't imply "progress," though.  Any age will be able to draw a graph just like this, showing movement from values alien to their own, to values closer to their own, to their own values.  That will certainly look like progress to them, but that doesn't make it progress in any real sense.

El Cumbanchero

Our brothers at the BSBFB have posted this video of children at play.



They say it is a serious matter, and indeed, once it was.  This is a most serious group, with big-band and references to President Kennedy.

Night At The Museum

A most excellent evening recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in New York City)! Of course I thought of all of you. I think of you often, and snap pictures, and then life takes over and they remain in my phone.

It was called The Grand Tour (symbolic of how, years ago, a young person wasn't fully educated until they had taken a year or so and traveled around the world (did I ever mention the Met is snooty? You must go to the NY Historical Society to get the other-side-of-the-tracks story). 

There were some great things going on: lectures (one on Medieval beekeeping!), demonstrations, live music, and receptions throughout the museum (all my favorite spots, the American Wing (sculpture), the Petite Sculpture Hall (European sculpture, including one of Perseus, Rodin's Burghers of Calais, and some things I've seen but had not ever paid enough attention to - a later post), the Temple of Dendur (which is a great place to hear a concert), and Arms and Armor (happy sigh!)

It was fabulous being there at night. I was quite taken by the artwork and how different it looked at that time of day.

I attended a presentation of armor (photos below), and learned:

Firearms predated plate armor by 300 years and they lived together for about 300 years. The first firearm was from around 1320 and probably came from the far east. Northern Italy and Germany were the main armor makers because of ideal conditions in their region (nearby water, ability to have heat from forrest nearby, water to cool armor being made).

These replica helmets (above) were made in Philadelphia and Austria.The presenter said there is always a battle (no pun intended) in museum-world about whether to show original pieces or to show replicas, which could then show the recently restored padding and straps.

The presenter showed up how flexible this gauntlet was; unbelievable -- it can move quite fluidly.

The mail on the table was enormously flexible, and was very much like fabric.

We learned how there would be more metal in the front of the helmet, to deflect arrows, and less in the back, to save on materials. We also learned that plate armor was brought about by increased use of the crossbow. And that they would be shined up nicely not just to look good, though that was a part, but to help result in a "glancing shot," that is a shot where the arrow, which is already at a disadvantage since it must hit the steel at exactly the proper angle and at its highest velocity in order to penetrate, glides right off instead of penetrating the armor.

This picture was taken in the gift shop. I have never seen it before but it's a field trip kids from a long time ago took, to Arms and Armor.

I'll post some of the sculpture another time. I want to see if I can find some daytime shots to compare the shots I got at night.

A Wonder, Of Sorts

Thank you, Ms. Garofalo, for your kind opinion of your fellow Americans.

The thing is, I think there is a funny parallel within the GOP to Ms. Garofalo's reading.  The thing behind the "Herman Cain can't win" concept is that Republicans also assume that some racist sentiment will keep Cain from winning.  The lesson of the Florida straw poll is that, actually, once people get together they realize that he has an extraordinary amount of support.  Once people realized that their fellow Republicans weren't as racist as they expected them to be, Cain won in a walk.

The shock, apparently even to Republicans, is that there is very much less racism within the Republican party than they expected to find.  Everyone feared everyone else, but in the end, it proved that their hearts were all in the right place.

That was surely a wonder:  like the coming of dawn after a long night.

In God We Trust

Walter Russell Mead makes an interesting point.

In ancient times, the damage to two unique symbols of national identity by something as rare as an East Coast earthquake which did little or no damage to more pedestrian and less symbolic structures would have been highly noteworthy.  We would be rending our garments, consulting the Sibylline books and repenting in sackcloth and ashes after so a clear a demonstration of divine wrath.

The phrase "In God We Trust" has an 18th century ring, he says, but it's actually a 19th century creation -- as a phrase associated with the United States government it dates, in fact, to the worst days of the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln clearly thought of what he was doing as reforging a broken compact with God.  He spoke of the horrors of the war in just this way.  Just a year after adopting the phrase "In God We Trust" for Federal money, he said in his second inaugural address:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 

It is true that the America of 2011 does not believe in anything like the fashion of the America of 1864.  The question Mead is drawing our attention to is the question of whether that is good, bad, or irrelevant.  It's an interesting question, since the powerful and wise of the hour seem to fall chiefly into either the "good" or "irrelevant" camps.

Quite Right

The worst argument against the death penalty, of course, is that it’s somehow awful for the state to kill people. Nation-states are all about killing people. They exist solely because they’re better at that, on a large scale, than any other form of human organization. Everything else is superstructure, and if they lose that edge it will fade away.

Instapundit, today.

Today's Headline

"Terrorist arrested in elaborate plan to cause minor cosmetic damage to government buildings."

It is good to love your enemies.  I love this one for designing a plan that, even if it had worked, would have had no effect whatsoever on America aside from a few days' employment for out-of-work construction contractors.  Also for finding a way to make Toys'R'Us into a supplier of dual-use technology.

Dear Mr. Fox...

...won't you guard our henhouse?

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that," North Carolina's Gov. Beverly Perdue said yesterday. 

That's just what our government needs:  less accountability for public officials.  Great idea, ma'am.

Bob Dylan and the Girl

You probably know this song.  If you don't much like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash did it; and if you don't like either of them, I've never met you.



Who is the girl?

History preserves her name.  She was Suze Rotolo:  "an American artist, but... perhaps best known as  Bob Dylan's girlfriend between 1961 and 1964 and a strong influence on his music."  She died, at 67, of lung cancer.

If you're like anyone, she is the one who grabs your eye when you look at the cover.  He looks like nobody; yet she was the influence, and he was the genius.  She didn't do anything we readily know of her own.  Most Americans could name another two or three of Dylan's songs; those of his generation, ten or more.

There's a lesson here, and it's an important one.  I'm not sure quite how to formulate it.  It seems improper, and insufficient, to say simply:  "The girl matters."  But she does, and surely more than we have any way to articulate.  She walked with him once, in a lane:  and he wrote songs for her.

What Justification?

Socrates was a troublemaker like this.



The man is a liar, too.  He tells you in the first few minutes that he is a Jew, but he is in fact an Evangelical Christian.

I'm not particularly interested in the last few minutes of the video, though, where he goes fishing for men.  I'm interested in the substance of his argument about... well, watch and see.  The important part stops about the 23rd minute.  There's a real problem in the analogy he's making, and I'm curious if you'll see it.

Reasons to Prefer Monogamy

In a prior post Grim asks, "Is there some fundamental reason to prefer monogamy, or is it just what we're used to seeing?" Perhaps more disturbingly, he asserts that there is no competing interest to be balanced against the expressed desire of a woman to be in a polygamous marriage. I can think of several fundamental reasons why a society might prefer monogamy. I can also easily think of a crucial competing interest: that of children born into polygamous marriages. Both points will be addressed below:

Reason #1 to prefer monogamy to polygamy: Inbreeding.

Doctors and family members interviewed by New Times say up to 20 children from families in the polygamist community are currently afflicted with the condition that requires full-time attention from caregivers. Victims suffer a range of symptoms, including severe epileptic seizures, inability to walk or even sit upright, severe speech impediments, failure to grow at a normal rate, and tragic physical deformities.

"They are in terrible shape," says Dr. Kirk A. Aleck, director of the Pediatric Neurogenetics Center at St. Joseph's Hospital. Aleck is a geneticist who participated along with Tarby and others in the groundbreaking study of several polygamous families with fumarase deficiency in the late 1990s.

There is no cure for the disease, which impedes the body's ability to process food at the cellular level.

"But...", you say, "that's just one community". Except the same problems exist halfway across the world in Turkey. Different religion. Different culture. Same result:

Ayla has recently uncovered a disturbing side effect of polygamy and inbreeding.

Repeated intermarrying within families, typically between first and second cousins, has produced abnormally high rates of children with Downs Syndrome and Mediterranean anaemia.

Hmm... let's try a third continent:

Often it is not a question of remarriage but simply of inheritance, a widow being automatically transferred as wife to the man designated by the rules of succession. This implies a certain weakness or even the non-existence of prohibitions on marriages between affines; a man can inherit wives from his brother and from his father, although naturally his own mother is excluded. This practice, which is fairly frequent in Africa, flagrantly contravenes bothe the Christian and the Muslim teaching on incest.”

So much for that whole consent thingy. Wives are property....which brings us to reason #2.

2. Forced marriages and child brides.

Forced marriages, child brides, polygamy and arranged marriages between first cousins are some of the problems that Canadian immigration officials in Pakistan have to deal with.

3. Aging fathers + aging sperm = more birth defects. In societies where polygamy is common, men often continue to have children into their old age. Not only are older men unlikely to live long enough to ensure their latter born offspring are provided for, but their children face a higher risk of birth defects.

In a monogamous marriage, fertility is limited - naturally - by a woman's waning fertility and eventually, her inability to conceive. Not so when an 80 year old man can marry (and impregnate) a 12 year old.

4. Welfare and immigration issues. From communities where half the residents are on welfare and the majority of children live below the poverty level to Muslim immigrants who repeatedly return home (where polygamy is legal) and then bring their wives back to North America to collect welfare and state medical benefits to smuggling of child brides (gotta do something about that incest problem!), it's pretty clear that the rosy scenario of a rich, benevolent man supporting multiple wives and many children doesn't quite live up to the advertising.

5. Cost of living/stability: it costs more to support 3 wives and 15 children than one wife and 2 childen. The greater the number of dependents, the worse the consequences of financial reverses.

Not all rich men stay rich for life. What happens to all those wives and children when Daddy loses his nest egg? (see previous item)

6. Human nature/jealousy. Few women want to share a man. For that matter, few men want to share a woman. Pretty much every article I read pointed out that the Koran says the first wife must agree to a multiple marriage. And they all said that this is ignored in practice. Why? (hint: see item #8)

7. Parental neglect/children growing up with no father in their lives. Not recognizing your children when you meet them in the street is not a good thing:

Mehmet Arslan Aga, a sprightly, pot-bellied, 64-year-old Kurdish village chieftain from Isuklar, seems an unlikely defender of monogamy as he has five wives, 55 children, 80 grandchildren and a small army of servants. But he insists that if he had his time again, he would only marry once.

Although his large number of wives underlines his powerful status, he has found it a challenge to build each wife a house far from the others to prevent them from competing and struggles to remember all of his children's names.

He recently saw two young boys fighting on the street and intervened, breaking up the fight and telling them they would bring shame on their families. "Don't you recognize me?" one of them said. "I'm your son."

His biggest headache, though, he says, stems from jealousy among the wives, the first of whom he married out of love. "My rule is to behave equally toward all of my wives," he said. "But the first wife was very, very jealous when the second wife came. When the third arrived, the first two created an alliance against her. So I have to be a good diplomat."

Apart from the need to play marital referee, Mehmet, who owns land and shops throughout the region, says the financial burden of so many offspring can be overwhelming. He explained, "When I go to the shoe shop, I buy 100 pairs of shoes at a time. The clerk at the store thinks I'm a shoe salesman and tells me to go visit a wholesaler."

Despite his fecund lifestyle, Mehmet Aga acknowledges that polygamy is an outmoded practice and has taken personal steps to ensure that it is coming to a halt in his village. He has banned his own sons from taking second wives and is educating his daughters; he will not allow them to become second wives. He claims that his situation derives from his ignorance and the need to make tribal alliances. "I was uneducated back then, and Allah commands us to be fruitful and multiply, but having so many wives can create problems. If you want to be happy, marry one wife."

8. Lack of consent/willingness from the first wife. An old movie quote comes to mind:

"But we had a deal!"

"I have altered our arrangement. Pray I do not alter it further".

9. Gross power imbalance. A man and a woman who marry have roughly equal power. It is up to them to decide how it will be shared. In a marriage between one man and multiple women, the wife faces not only competition from her husband but competition from other wives eager to gain power/influence.

10. Divorce. It's a big enough problem now between monogamous couples. How is marital property equitably disposed of when there are multiple wives, each with children? If a woman wants to leave a polygamous marriage, her actions affect many more people. Maybe that explains why most societies that allow polygamy don't think a woman should be able to get a divorce (unlike men).

I can think of many more, but this has gone on long enough. This article has an example of a situation where polygamy seems to have worked out for all concerned. I'm sure there are others, but anecdotes are generally a pretty poor basis for public policy decisions.

Note: Because Grim's argument was rooted in the notion of what a woman thinks is good for her, I purposely did not consider the drawbacks for men (though I believe they exist and would have little problem coming up with a similar list from the male perspective).

"Beauty and Brutality"

An article from Medievalists.net, on 'Iceland's literary landscapes.'  It goes with this video, which is part of a new documentary.  The video is of very high quality, so try expanding it to full screen.

Variations

I'd have to say that Johnny Cash wins the prize on this one, by a good sight.  Still, in fairness, he had the advantage of being much older when he did it.

Probabilities

You may have seen this article on the probability of your existence written by a student at Havard.  (H/t Instapundit).

So what’s the probability of your existing?  It’s the probability of 2 million people getting together – about the population of San Diego – each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice – and they all come up the exact same number – say, 550,343,279,001.

A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible.  By that definition, I’ve just proven that you are a miracle.

With all due respect to our friend at Harvard, that's wrong in two ways.

First, since you're reading the article, the probability of your existence is 1.

Second, though, what is the probability of existence itself existing?  1, by the same principle:  but if you're going to run the regress, and try to figure out what the probability-of-coming-to-exist was before it happened, you need to know something that in fact you do not and cannot know.  Heidegger said that the great question of metaphysics is "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  That isn't a question that admits of mathematical proofs, since mathematics doesn't exist until the universe and its laws exist.

Rhymes

Dr. Hanson does best when he writes about history, as he does this morning.

Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.

The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working....  

Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of the rich who think that a greedy heir won’t really inherit their hard-won or suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, the theme is not just imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical indulgence.

Fortunately, he has a remedy to propose.

"A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored."

That sounds right to me.

The Godfather

How many of you like Herman Cain, but think there's no point in taking him seriously because he can't win?

In the days before the vote, nearly all the delegates who voted for Cain either said or heard someone else say this: "I love Herman Cain, but he can't get elected." The assumption that Cain can't win the Republican nomination was a serious obstacle in their minds. But at some point late Friday and early Saturday, the delegates overcame that obstacle. Some concluded that since they had heard so many people speak well of Cain, he could indeed win, if everyone who liked him would actually vote for him.

Now that's interesting.

UPDATE:  Here is the video of Mr. Cain's remarks on health care at the recent debate.



I remember reading some posts by left-leaning writers, which I can't seem to find now, that pointed to these very remarks from the debate as the ones that made them angriest.  Their point, as I recall, was that nothing in Obama's plan would put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.  I assume they believe this is true because the letter of the law does not do so.

However, it's hard to see how the plan avoids triggering the consequence, even if it does not state that it will do so.

Africa Leads the Way?

One of the stranger headlines today touts the fact that Africa is one of the bright spots in the global economy.  Why?  They ran out of money first, so they reformed first.

Developing countries from across the world, including Africa, are portraying themselves as "innocent bystanders" of the economic storm boiling out of Europe and the United States, and have joined the chorus calling on the European nations in crisis to bite the bullet of painful economic reforms.

"It is not easy, it is painful, and we went through the pain, and the Europeans must be prepared to go through the pain," African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka told Reuters in an interview.

He said the reforms needed in the ailing southern European states involved the kind of overhauls of public finances and labor markets and other structural reforms that African nations -- with firm urging from the IMF and World Bank -- had tackled over the last two decades and now had results to show for it.

Fund and Bank experts say sound macroeconomic reforms and better budget management are some factors that have helped propel robust growth in sub-Saharan Africa since 2000.  This has given the region one of the brightest outlooks of any region amid the prevailing gloom.

So what kind of reforms did the IMF suggest, that produced these excellent results?

The IMF sometimes advocates “austerity programmes,” cutting public spending and increasing taxes even when the economy is weak, in order to bring budgets closer to a balance, thus reducing budget deficits. Countries are often advised to lower their corporate tax rate.

Really.  That sounds vaguely familiar.

Oh, in other news, President Obama gave a speech.  He says that the proposed GOP reforms would "cripple America."  Fortunately, he'll be there to keep those reforms from happening.

Polygamy in Georgia

From Atlanta's own Channel 2 news, a story that a school assignment is promoting Islamic polygamy:

Medlin showed Regan the assignment brought home by his 13-year-old daughter. The assignment consisted of a letter from Ahlima, a 20-year-old Muslim woman, and touts the advantage of a wearing a Burqa and finds the way western women dress to be "horribly immodest," according to the assignment. 

The assignment shows Ahlima saying she doesn't mind if her future husband takes more wives. "I understand that some Westerners condemn our practice of polygamy, but I also know they are wrong," the assignment said... 

Another page of the assignment lists the seven conditions for women's dress in Islam, including:

-It cannot resemble the clothing of nonbelieving women

-It must protect women from the lustful gaze of men 

It also states, "Islam liberated woman over 1,400 years ago. Is it better to dress according to man or God?”

My favorite part of this story is the school's explanation for the assignment:  'to help students put the school dress code into context.'

Once I met a playwright from Al Kut who claimed he was going to seek asylum in America -- not from the Ba'athists, but from his two wives.  Apparently they were fine when they were alone together, but as soon as he walked in the door the jealousy and sniping began.

That said, it strikes me that there is a feminist argument for (as well as the more familiar feminist argument against) polygamy.  Naturally a woman wants to marry a man who has good bloodlines and who can provide for her and her children during the times when she is unable to do so.  Under monogamy, most women must settle for a man who is only average or below; but the richest men could more readily afford ten children than a poor man can afford one.  Since wealth is often correlated with self-control, hard work, and intelligence, one could argue that these men would also be better quality mates.

Why should a woman have to select an unmarried loser, just to preserve a level playing field for the men who are seeking wives?

Elise said a while ago -- I can't recall the exact context -- that it should matter to men who proclaim that they love the women in their lives that the women prefer monogamy.  Fair enough; but what if they didn't?  What if the woman, like Ahlima, happened to prefer to marry the best man even if he had another wife?  Polygamy at least preserves what marriage is for:  it binds families into new kinship bonds, and provides for the generations.  (Actually, one might put it the other way, and say that monogamy preserves what marriage is for, since polygamy may be the older and historically more-common form.)

Is it just Islam?  Apparently not, because people were just as upset when the Mormons proclaimed that polygamy was acceptable.  The Jews practiced it in the old days, and Christ used a polygamous bridegroom as the explanatory model for his church.  It can't be said to be un-Christian or irreligious, then; it's just, so to speak, un-American.

Or so it has been.  Is there some fundamental reason to prefer monogamy, or is it just what we're used to seeing?

The End of the World

Are you ready?

I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago the IMF’s calculation that China will become the planet’s leading economic power by the year 2016. And I added that, if that proves correct, it means the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economy. I thought that line might catch on. After all, we’re always told that every election is the most critical consequential watershed election of all time, but this one actually would be: For the first time since Grover Cleveland’s first term, America would be electing a global also-ran. But there’s not a lot of sense of America’s looming date with destiny in these presidential debates.... On Thursday night, there was a question on gays in the military but none on the accelerating European debt crisis. 

It's a small matter. If the world as we know it does end, all the gays will be involved in the war.

Down a Forest Service Road

Today I took the motorcycle up into North Carolina, across the rim of NC 106 toward Highland, and then down into the National Forest near Rabun Bald.  Forest Service Road 7 runs several miles through pure wilderness in northeast Georgia near the Bartram Trail.  

It's a rugged road, and it was an adventure getting down it on a motorcycle.  The last time I was on this road it was covered in snow, although I believe it was March or April.  We were in the truck, and came across a place where the road was blocked by a fallen tulip or maple tree.  I had a good Bowie knife, though, so I quickly cut the tree apart and we were on our way.

Well, today I had to do that again, only this time it was a red oak!  Fortunately, after I was about halfway through the tree and into the heart wood, a Ford F-350 came up the road from the other direction.  The two guys were older gentlemen revisiting a favorite camping spot from their youth.  They had been horse packers back then, and would ride into the wilderness for a week at a time:  but lately there are many more restrictions placed on horses in the national forest.  

Anyway, they had a big truck and a good rope, whereas I had only a motorcycle.  They put a rope on the tree and broke it where I'd cut it -- it was too big to simply pull out of the way -- and then the three of us pushed it off the road in the two pieces.   That saved me a good deal of time!

I also saw a fellow with a two-mule team moving the remains of a front-end loader, which I suppose didn't survive the mountains.  The mules did all right, though.  A couple of those mammoth jack mules can move just about anything you're likely to be inclined to move.


Mrs. Grim ran off with the camera this weekend, so I don't have any pictures for you.  Here's some music instead.  How about some bagpipes in honor of the soon-coming Stone Mountain Scottish Highland Games?



Or maybe this one?

Or one more, since I ran across a rendition of "Scotland the Brave" on this very trip.

 

The Downgrade Simplified

From the Gator Gainseville Tea Party:

Why S&P Downgraded the US:

U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Total budget cuts: $385

That makes it pretty clear. (H/t D29.)

The Rose Abides

Retriever has written a moving post about death and loved ones. She ends:

Lately, I keep roaming around my familiar haunts with different cameras, setting myself ridiculous tests or trying out different lenses, simply to distract myself. As if one could frame the same reality and somehow change it. As if capturing a rose in bloom might preserve it, like something caught in amber. Forever on display. Either that or rot and decay. Everything hurtling to destruction, and so I snap from the careening car that beautiful view, that bird, that pair climbing the hill. The beauty we must not miss.

What if the rose is in no danger?

There is a school of metaphysics, whose claims are suggested by Einstein's special relativity theory, that holds that each of us exists as an object extended in four dimensions: the three you know, and time. Thus the rose exists as a kind of line, that begins the moment it takes on existence as an independent object -- say, the moment at which its genetic code is set, so that it is a new and distinct object with its own structure. The line, widening as the rose grows, extends to the moment that the rose dies.

Because this object contains all the time during which the rose exists, the object itself is static and unchanging. If you saw the rose in bloom, it is because your object snakes close enough to the rose, at a particular point upon the rose-object when the rose was in full bloom. If your object turns away from it, then, and goes home, it can snake back in the direction of the rose in a month or a year, and find it gone or rotting; and so you think the rose is lost.

But the bloom is not lost. It is there, in the object, now as forever. Nothing is lost, not ever.

So this school holds, at least.

Checking in with GWB

Walt Harrington is a reporter who knew the former President for a long time. How long?

In Midland all those years ago, the normal distance between prominent source and reporter didn’t apply, and W. invited me out to a Mexican restaurant with Laura and their four-year-old twin daughters, who got in trouble for throwing chips, were threatened with a spanking, and went home without dessert.

He stopped in recently to see his old friend, and report on how he's doing.

Twenty-five years later, George W. Bush looks great. Two years as a civilian have been good to him. His feet clad in golf shoes and up on his desk, he leans back in his chair, a well-mouthed, unlit cigar as a prop. At 7:45 A.M., he’s talking golf.

Golf is a fine pastime for a retired President.

The End

The closing remarks from VodkaPundit sum up the debate thus:

In the war of ideas, it was all Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Herman Cain and Ron Paul. In the battle of personalities, it was Mitt versus Rick.

The news networks will remember the battle, not the war.

Rep. Bachmann doesn't make his summation at all, which is sadly appropriate. She did very well in the early phase, but given her unfortunate performance over the vaccine issue this week, in which she has taken the time I wished to give her to first double down on the assertion, and then to deny responsibility for the claim -- she was only passing on the word of a distraught mother -- I suppose I can no longer support her candidacy. She is a good woman, I am sure, but she does not have the quality of command.

The long campaigns have the benefit of showing such flaws in time for us to make an informed decision. Unfortunately, at this time there is no clear choice to whom I might transfer my support. When I stop to think about whom I might want to be President -- if I could choose anyone at all -- I can think of no one. Certainly I do not see anyone to support among the frontrunners of our two parties: but I can think of no one at all. The office is so heavy that I know no one who could bear it. I don't want another President, not any other one. Not until the office is smaller, better fit for a man or a woman.

A good reason to support Rep. Bachmann was that she seemed to understand the importance of sliding the power out of the Federal government, and letting it fall to the states or back to the People. That is the one big idea that we need to advance. Who shall carry it?

A Death in Texas

While we are talking about the death penalty, you should read this piece by Steve Earle.  The guilt of the accused is not in doubt in this case:  he brutally killed two women and nearly one man, the last of whom lost an eye in the attack.

What follows is a story of redemption and death.

The Death Penalty

Georgia carried out the execution we discussed the other day; I've been thinking about it a great deal.  The Atlantic has a long piece on the philosophical underpinnings of the death penalty in America, which may be worth reading.

There is no compelling reason to believe that Troy Davis was innocent, as is being attested so strongly by so many today.  He fled Savannah on the date of the crime; and the gun he allegedly used to shoot off-duty officer McPhail was supposed to be the same gun he had used to shoot another man in the face earlier that night.  His membership in the crowd of people who might shoot someone in the face -- that is, his gangsterism -- is  not in dispute.  He begged the jury, on conviction, for "another chance," which is not suggestive of innocence.  Seven of the nine eye-witnesses recanted their testimony after the trial; but on the other hand, it is to their benefit in street culture to say they were pressured by police to testify versus standing up for having helped the law convict.  One of the non-recanting witnesses allegedly boasts about having been the real killer; but again, in the culture we're talking about, such boasting has a demonstrable benefit.  It raises your stature.  Since there's no danger of prosecution -- the case is cleared by arrest and conviction -- why not boast?  There's benefit but no cost.

There are a couple of things that are suggestive, though.  One that may be unconvincing to many is Mr. Davis' refusal of a final meal or a prayer:  he seems to have been convinced that things would work out for him, which suggests a strong faith.  One that may be more convincing to most is that no .38 caliber pistol was ever found to link to Mr. Davis; whereas the braggart admitted to having one in his possession at the time of the crime.  Oddly, it was not produced for ballistics testing.  Why not?

Ultimately it may well be the case that my state, Georgia, has just executed an innocent man.  It may also be that he was guilty.  We do not know.  The lawful process was followed with complete thoroughness; all the safeguards tested, but in the end they did not serve to stop a questionable killing.

I've been spending a fair amount of time rereading John Locke, who (like Kant!) is a big fan of capital punishment.  I begin to doubt that our system of government is legitimate enough to carry out an execution; at least, I think it is not legitimate enough in cases when a person has not explicitly accepted the social contract.    For a traitor, who has sworn an oath and breaks it?  Yes.  But for someone who has never agreed to be governed?  It will not do to say, as Socrates did, that they have accepted the benefits and are therefore bound as slaves to the state; that cannot hold in an era in which you are no longer free to move to, and live in, another country without explicit permission in the form of a visa.  To say that you are bound by the contract whether you consent or not is to say that it is not a contract.  It is an imposition by force, which by our tradition means that it is no contract at all.

Mr. Davis, at the age of twenty, clearly did not accept the contract:  he was a gangster, part of a society that explicitly rejects the law.  Perhaps he accepted the contract with the necessary explicitness when he surrendered to the police without a fight, accepting his life in exchange for the wager of trial and conviction.

To kill a fighting enemy is fair and honest; to kill a prisoner helpless is a morally dangerous act.  Better for him to have died twenty years ago with a gun in his hand:  better for him and for us.  Instead he surrendered to our justice, and now we have given what we have of it to offer:  binding a man with chains, and then poisoning him while he cannot resist.

UPDATE:  For those interested in the strength of the evidence, the Federal opinion on the evidence is here.  (H/t Clayton Cramer, who points out that one of the non-recanting eyewitnesses was a US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel -- certainly not a likely subject for police intimidation, and an officer whose word we would normally rely on in other life-or-death contexts.)

Testaments to Skill

The skipper of this sloop is a man of skill and prowess at his craft.

These gentlemen, on the other hand, show room for improvement.

Counting the Dead

Historians are now suggesting that the Civil War killed a lot more people than we had previously understood.  Relying on census data, they posit a new figure of at least three quarters of a million people, and perhaps 850,000.  What does that mean in terms of the trauma to the civilization?

The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict[.]

For purposes of comparison, consider that less than 1% of Americans of military age have even fought in the Iraq war.*  A conflict that approached the Civil War would have resulted if everyone who served in Iraq had died there; and then nine times as many more were sent, and they also all died there.

Are such conflicts behind us?  ZenPundit, who has been writing about the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine being promulgated at the UN by Anne Marie Slaughter and the Obama administration, warns that the doctrine is deadly on its face.

Finally, while boldly rejecting international law’s long established definition of sovereignty, Slaughter offers two easily falsifiable assertions, that states can no longer govern effectively by governing alone and that the ever present danger of arbitrary meddling by foreigners is a prerequisite for good governance. If so, Switzerland would be a Hobbesian hellhole today and Central America and the Caribbean islands would resemble tropical Singapores . The omnipresent threat of foreign meddling on religious grounds is what states ran away from screaming after the Thirty Year’s War, which may have killed up to a third of all the people in the Germanies.

"A third of all the people in the Germanies" is of course not 10%, but 33%.  Surely we are too wise for that, though; wars where millions died for an ideology where surely left behind with the 20th century.  Weren't they?


* The exact figures on how many served in Iraq appear to run between one and one and a half million; there are more than two hundred million Americans of military age, if we take military age to be 18-65 (which we should, as several of our general officers have served in Iraq past the age of sixty).  Note that we move from "white men" to "Americans" because (a) the demographic composition of American society has changed so substantially since 1860 that we could only sustain anything like a comparative figure by expanding "white" so that the category meant simply "not black"; but even then (b) black Americans are a disproportionately large part of our military forces, meaning that we still wouldn't get a reasonable comparison. For a similar reason, note the move away from "men."  However, note that the "less than one percent" can be read as "only about one percent" even if you restrict the sample to "American men of military age," of whom there are slightly more than 100 million.

"Pressure"

"In a move without precedent in the modern era, Republican congressional leaders... have penned a letter" to the Fed.

The shocking thing here, surely, is that no one ever did it before.  Although the Fed's board of governors are appointed by the President, the Fed is not technically a part of the US Government, but it controls our money supply and -- in important ways -- the dollar itself.

Printing money is a Constitutional function of the Congress, but actually printing money isn't the way that the money supply is manipulated most of the time now; mostly it is done via actions like the Fed's "Quantitative Easing," in which purely notional transactions between banks "reduce" or "expand" the money supply.  The Congress has granted the Fed authority to manipulate the money supply in that way, and so Congress has in a sense delegated its Constitutional duty to the Fed.

Since the Fed's authority is derived from Congress' authority to print money, why wouldn't Congressional leadership send a letter to the Fed telling the Fed what it thinks about the money supply?  It's Congress' authority that is being used here, after all.  Even if we have decided to delegate that authority to an independent board, Congressional leadership surely has a legitimate power to send a letter voicing an opinion as to how Congress' delegate authority should be used.

Off to France

T99 says she is off to France, on what sounds like a well-earned trip.  (She also added that she'll be trying to check in by blackberry, about which I know nothing; but I have tried to enable Blogger's mobile-device mode for easy viewing on that platform.  Let me know if it works.)

I have never been to France, but my mother and sister had a wonderful time there a few years ago.  If I were to go, I would want to go and see whatever festival this happens to be:



The song is a cheery one in French, though an old and traditional.  Here is one that is newly composed, within the last dozen years or so, but in a dialect of French that is genuinely Medieval.



Of course, most likely you will want to see the modern France, and not the one that would interest me.  You'll have to let us know what you find there of value.

An Ambassador

It sounds as though we may have profited from Mr. Huntsman's attempt at the Presidency, after all.

About a month after his arrival in Beijing to take up his new post as United States ambassador to China, former commerce secretary Gary Locke has aroused wide public attention, curiosity and controversy with his seemingly simple lifestyle and people-friendly posture.

Locke, the first Chinese-American to become US ambassador to China, arrived in Beijing in economy class on August 12. Television footage showed a leisurely dressed Locke walking out of the airport with a backpack, like a backpacker tourist in every way.

Then a Chinese tourist posted a photo on the Internet showing Locke sporting a small backpack and buying his own coffee at Seattle airport's Starbucks.

These scenes immediately created a buzz among Chinese netizens. It was hard for them to imagine Chinese officials doing such things. Even the New Left, who are critical of capitalism and against China becoming "Westernized", praised Locke. On Utopia, a major website of the New Left, a commentary said, "Compatriot Locke, hypocritical as his acts may be, is however giving a good lesson to our cadres on how not to cut themselves off from the masses."

After accompanying United States Vice President Joe Biden on a tour to Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, Locke flew back to Beijing on an Air China flight on August 23 - again in economy class. The next day, a stewardess of the flight wrote on her blog:

Yesterday, Ambassador Gary Locke flew back to Beijing on our flight. Not only did he reject attempts by our ground staff to give him special VIP treatment, he also rejected an upgrade to first class as well as the coach on arrival. In economy class, Locke remained polite and unassuming throughout the entire journey, while another customer in first class began making demands as soon as he boarded the flight. What a stark difference.

Well! That's refreshing:  not merely a diplomat who is diplomatic, but an American public official who knows how to fly economy class with courtesy.  It's not just the CCP -- American officials could benefit from the strength of the example.

Comments Restored to Blogger Standard

Based on the general commentary, I've restored the Blogger standard comments -- which, oddly enough, are very much like the old Haloscan comments.  Hopefully someday I'll be able to restore the old discussions, which I have saved as a database for now.

Thank you for your patience during this annoying hassle imposed upon us without our consent.

The Preacher and the Bear

A hymn from Georgia's own late, great Jerry Reed, complete with shotgun and straight razor.

Loud Pipes Save Lives

The argument, familiar to bikers, is now being made about electric and hybrid cars. Of course, since (as Glenn Reynolds points out) a car is far more deadly to other people on the highway than any motorcycle, the lives being saved are no longer the owner of the "loud" engine, but the bicyclists or joggers.

For a while this summer I was driving a relatively quiet motorcycle down in the Tampa/St. Pete area. I had a woman merge on top of me entirely because she was busy talking on her cell phone, not looking where she was going, and generally unaware that I was anywhere in the area. Of course, down there you have the added issue of hearing problems, since (as the locals say) 'Tampa is where everyone's grandmother goes to retire -- and St. Pete is where her mother lives.'

Lots of bicyclists and joggers, too.

Request for Comments: Comments

The most important feature of this Hall is the community. For that reason, I'm interested in making sure that it is easy for you to comment, so that you will comment more often. I've heard from Mr. Hines that he's having some trouble with the Disqus business; and Elise didn't like it compared to Blogger's general comment system. In addition to that, it seems to be taking extra time to load the page, which is annoying for me. I had heard that Disqus could restore the old comments from Haloscan/Echo, but so far I haven't been able to get that to work. What do you think? Should we abandon the effort, and go to the Blogger comments on the ground that they are simpler and load faster? If I do that, would you prefer a pop-up comments window, or a Disqus-style?

Gasden Dollar

Not a bad bit of origami, I'd say.

Living Well, Dying Well

I have been absent, struggling with the sudden catastrophic illness of a dear aunt just as I prepare to travel to France with my sister, our first trip together as adults and my first crossing of the Atlantic.

Thanks to the mercy of hospice care, things are better now for my aunt and therefore, of course, for me. I am waking up, therefore, to all of the things I ordinarily would have been attending to in the wider world during the last several weeks. One of those is 9/11. Scrolling back through a week or two of posts at my favorite sites, I found many attempts to identify the core of what we should take away from that formative experience ten years later. A commenter at Assistant Village Idiot put it this way:

For about two hours, the bad guys seemed to have invented an unstoppable new strategic weapon, with who knew what dire long term consequences, but then it proved they were stoppable by unarmed frequent flyers. And there haven’t been any kamikaze hijackings since Flight 93.

Another commenter at the same site sent me to this link with an article written only days after the event, also identifying the heroism of the passengers of Flight 93 as the proper focus of 9/11 memorials:

Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism -- the most deadly yet invented -- came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.

I have not been called on to save anyone's life this month. I have only been asked to find a way to intervene in the intolerable suffering of a 95-year-old woman who was being ground up in a shocking medical and legal system. I have resurfaced in the world of internet commentary that normally is such an important part of my daily life to find that Grim has written several indispensable posts about how we exert ourselves to act properly. Every day someone involved in my aunt's care has the power to propel either her or me (or both of us) into the depths of extravagant misery or onto the summits of consolation and peace. What happens to us can be important, but how we act is everything. "Inasmuch as you did it unto one of the least of these My brethren, you did it unto Me."

A doctor took my aunt's hand, looked into her eyes, and offered her a heartfelt apology for letting her down, before prescribing her the morphine she needed. That doctor turned our lives around in an instant by opening her eyes and doing her duty, when institutional inertia and burnt-out fatalism from family members entrusted with my aunt's well-being might have led the doctor to turn her back. Every moment is a choice.

Here is my aunt at the age of 26 in 1941. She came of age in the Depression. She is not a drug-seeking whiner. She is not simply looking for attention. She did not bring this suffering on herself by refusing surgery that probably would have killed her. She is now in the hands of people who can help her. My aunt may be with us for some months yet; her remaining time is a gift she can spend putting her affairs in order, rather than the sentence of torture that it was.

Swords Against Death

A great headline: "Violent Crimes Drop 12%, Reason Unknown; In Other News, Record Number Of Americans Carrying Concealed Weapons."

H/t to The Sage. The title, as most of you surely know, is a reference to Fritz Leiber's second short story collection. If you haven't read it, by all means you ought to do so.

Strong Women Belong in the Home

I'm not sure how sympathetic I am to these complaints.  On the one hand, I think, of course it's true:  and what did you expect? On the other hand, it's hard to accept a complaint from someone in the top 1% of influential people that they are ignored compared to the people in the top 0.5%.  It's true, as far as it goes; but nevertheless, you're at the table, and if you aren't "called on" you can still speak up on your own.  That's more influence than whole the TEA Party has on the President's economic policy, or would have even if they marched two million strong outside his house.

Leaving all of which aside, this is the worst defense against claims of sexism that I've ever seen:

“The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to house full of very strong women,” Dunn added.

There's no way that is going to fly.

An Execution in Georgia

The State of Georgia has the death penalty, but uses it fairly rarely.  Of the 1,267 people executed by the United States since the restoration of the death penalty in 1976, only 51 have been from Georgia.

We've got one coming up next week that has gotten a great deal of attention.  One of the problems with protesting an execution is that all of them get protested by certain groups organized for the purpose, which makes it hard to generate interest when there may be genuine doubts about the guilt of the accused.  

Is it important, or telling, when a case is successful in generating broad interest in opposing the court's findings?  The New York Times seems to believe that the reason there is so much interest in this case is primarily the success of the media campaign, and only secondarily the questions the case raises.

The victim of the killing was a Savannah police officer.  His mother believes the verdict is just:

His mother, Anneliese MacPhail, called the widespread rallies "a circus," saying, "It makes me angry. They better learn that he is guilty." 

She believes the case is being used by death penalty opponents to futher their cause  regardless of the facts. 

"It's not being told in an honest way," said MacPhail, 77, of Columbus.

Unlike any of us, Ms. McPhail doubtlessly paid rapt attention to the trial and the presentation of evidence.  On the other hand, as a mother it may be difficult to endorse the idea that the court was wrong, the punishment set aside, and the death of your son unavenged.

If you feel qualified to express an opinion on the subject, you may reach the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles at the address provided here.  The United Church of Christ, like the Pope, is among those urging that the execution be set aside; indeed, UCC believes that the accused should be pardoned outright.

"Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Zamoran Literature"

Mr. Sparkle sends this cache of the Trinity College, Dublin, webpage in which Trinity introduces its newest Fellow.  I salute Dr. B's interest in post-colonial studies, as it must be honestly come by:  at least, I am sure that no one ever successfully colonized Cimmeria!

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

We hear a lot about gridlock, but most of the gridlock results from the fact that there is a huge disagreement about the proper role and function of the government.  It may be pleasing to know that, in cases when there is common agreement that the Congress has clear and legitimate authority, it is sometimes easy to get legislation passed.

Calling the SEC on Social Security

You have to feel a bit bad for the poor woman with whom he speaks.



The real question isn't whether Social Security is a Ponzi scheme -- or, as Paul Krugman prefers, a "Ponzi game."  (Games are fun!)

The real question is just when the government may properly force Americans to make a bad investment.  The answer probably cannot be "never," because it is often difficult to determine if an investment is good or bad:  and, indeed, some of the best investments start off as highly questionable ventures that prove out only because of a combination of faith, luck, and talent.

On the other hand, there are a few models -- like this one -- that are reliably bad investments.  There are also times when (as John Stewart notes in his praise for "faceless bureaucrats" in this clip) the investment's problems are sufficiently obvious that a taxpayer might reasonably object to having their hard-earned money soaked into the venture.

Should there be a protection for citizens from being taxed to support ventures that are reliably bad investments?  That seems reasonable to me.  The second type of case is harder to answer.

Self-Command

Steven Pinker, a philosopher with whose views I generally do not accord, has a good review of a book on self-control.  While some neuroscientists have used their work to cast doubt on free will and autonomy, their lessons properly interpreted are showing us new ways of exercising command over the machine.

Immediately after students engage in a task that requires them to control their impulses — resisting cookies while hungry, tracking a boring display while ignoring a comedy video, writing down their thoughts without thinking about a polar bear or suppressing their emotions while watching the scene in "Terms of Endearment" in which a dying Debra Winger says goodbye to her children — they show lapses in a subsequent task that also requires an exercise of willpower, like solving difficult puzzles, squeezing a handgrip, stifling sexual or violent thoughts and keeping their payment for participating in the study rather than immediately blowing it on Doritos. Baumeister tagged the effect “ego depletion,” using Freud’s sense of “ego” as the mental entity that controls the passions.

Baumeister then pushed the muscle metaphor even further by showing that a depleted ego can be invigorated by a sugary pick-me-up (though not an indistinguishable beverage containing diet sweetener). And he showed that self-control, though almost certainly heritable in part, can be toned up by exercising it. He enrolled students in regimens that required them to keep track of their eating, exercise regularly, use a mouse with their weaker hand or (one that really gave them a workout) speak in complete sentences and without swearing. After several weeks, the students were more resistant to ego depletion in the lab and showed greater self-control in their lives.

Now that you know this, you have another toolset for exercising autonomy.  Your unconscious mind may be making decisions from moment to moment before the issue rises to your conscious control:  but if you set long-term goals, and keep track of adherence to them, you can steer.

If you find yourself having trouble, eat some chocolate, drink some soda, and then get back to it.

Repent

Lars Walker has a good insight.

The "May Day Carol" is my favorite hymn on the subject of repentance.  It's a concept not much in vogue, but of eternal power for those who find it.  Mr. Walker's understanding that repentance is fundamentally an act of courage is even more true for those who live in an age that will not understand, and will therefore not support, the difficult sacrifice.

A Girl and Her Dog

He's supposed to be my dog.  Sometimes when they get to playing together, he seems to forget.

Libraries and Sex Offenders

The Volokh Conspiracy (these days, I suppose we could abbreviate that to "VC," but I still prefer not to do so) questions whether Tennessee can Constitutionally, under the First Amendment, ban sex offenders from libraries. There are some interesting points raised by the logic.

But content-neutral limitations on who may access this government property are, I think, constitutional so long as they are reasonable in light of the purposes to which the government chooses to dedicate the property. And while I’m not sure that such a policy is likely to be especially effective, I do think it passes the rather low bar of reasonableness, given the government’s purpose of providing an especially safe environment for children, an environment that parents and children will be eager to take advantage of.

It's also reasonable given that female librarians outnumber male ones by approximately 4-1. The link is to a study of gender-bias against males who work in libraries, which include "being expected to handle physical tasks such as moving furniture, [and] being expected to work night or weekend shifts for security[.]"

That is the sort of bias which, although I suppose it really is bias, accords with rather than offends good sense. On average, men will be better suited for moving furniture; and although men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than are women, the exception to that is the crime of rape (see table 5, which estimates that women suffer rape at about ten times the rate of men).

I've spent a fair amount of my life in libraries, and it's fairly common for there to be no men at all who work in them (although, as the article notes, that is less true at academic libraries, where the ration is merely 3-1 female-male). Often libraries close after dark, and someone is going to have to stay behind to close when the most of the staff goes home. Since public libraries are public places, you can't remove people from them without some sort of legal reason. Imagine not having the capacity to remove a registered sex offender who simply came into the library every day, who sat quietly but often stared at the women behind the desks. This is surely the kind of work environment that would be considered hostile! It may also be dangerous, as stalking often is a precondition for rape, as the focus of the stalker on his victim intensifies over time. Yet the man in question is not causing a disturbance, is not a co-worker who can be punished administratively, and so forth. There needs to be a lawful cause that authorizes the police to ask him to leave if they are requested to do so. Surely this is reasonable.

UPDATE: However, I agree with Dr. Reynold's commenter: the reasonable nature of the law depends to a large degree on keeping the definition of "sex offender" pretty tight. "Not only are the punishments becoming more petty; the definition of ‘sex offender’ becomes more petty by the day. For instance, in many jurisdictions you don’t want to get caught answering nature’s emergency call by the side of the road. Who knew such distress could someday cause the yanking of your library card?"

The failure of reason here, however, isn't in keeping rapists and pedophiles out of libraries; it lies in exploding the category of "sex offender."

True Virtue

Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.

In most societies, Seligman and Peterson wrote, these strengths were considered to have a moral valence, and in many cases they overlapped with religious laws and strictures. But their true importance did not come from their relationship to any system of ethics or moral laws but from their practical benefit: cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that was not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling.

These are things that I have sometimes called true or absolute virtues. No matter what your goals, or your other moral values, courage is a virtue for you: it will help you achieve them. An ability to understand your duty and to command yourself to fulfill it will be useful to every man, and every woman, and every child. This moral reality is embedded in the structure of the world.

Emotional Certainty is Usually Wrong

Via our friends at Brandywine Books, a review of On Being Certain. The subject is that feeling of certainty that you have in your gut, which tells you that something "just feels right" regardless of the evidence.

That feeling is generally unreliable, the book finds. I trust this won't surprise you; but it does touch on another issue that we have discussed here from time to time. That issue is free will, given the prevalence of the subconscious mind in our thinking.

Another idea that I’d heard about before but gets replayed here is the notion that the brain understands and reacts to some situations before conscious perception can possibly intervene. Burton highlights this activity in two cases: baseball players hitting a fastball and piano players doing long, fast runs up and down the keys. In both cases, the movements involved are too fast for the conscious mind to intervene. (In baseball in particular, the body has to start moving before the perceptual process finishes alerting the conscious brain that a ball is on the way.)

Our friends at Arts & Letters Daily linked to a good article on contemporary neuroscience, and the questions it raises for advocates of free will.

"Part of what's driving some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or something," says Al Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University in Tallahassee. If neuroscientists find unconscious neural activity that drives decision-making, the troublesome concept of mind as separate from body disappears, as does free will. This 'dualist' conception of free will is an easy target for neuroscientists to knock down, says Glannon. "Neatly dividing mind and brain makes it easier for neuroscientists to drive a wedge between them," he adds.

The trouble is, most current philosophers don't think about free will like that, says Mele. Many are materialists — believing that everything has a physical basis, and decisions and actions come from brain activity. So scientists are weighing in on a notion that philosophers consider irrelevant.

I wrote about this problem There is no problem for free will here, not even for dualists; but it is free will of Aristotle's type. Indeed, the point about pianos and baseball players makes the point. Yes, the conscious mind cannot intervene in catching a speeding baseball; but the habits that permit such processing to produce the desired results were developed as a free choice, corresponding to a vision of beauty.

You did not become a baseball player in the same way that ice melts because the sun strikes it: that is, you did not become a baseballer because you were acted on by an outside force that drove you to practice day in and day out. Rather, you became a baseball player because you wanted it. You built the habits, and developed the necessary virtues, so that your body would execute them when you didn't have time to think about it just as it would have if you had all the time in the world.

That was Aristotle's picture all along. He understood that often you would not have time to reason, but this did not undermine his idea that your rational nature made you free. It was particularly important to him that a man with the virtue of courage be courageous when there was no time to think about it: otherwise, courage was of no use in the kinds of situations when it matters most.

The Vaccine Issue

Rep. Bachmann hasn't settled up on the vaccine issue yet, but the question has caused quite a few people on the right to slam her hard. It's not too surprising to see relatively establishment publications like NRO go after her, as they are generally opposed to candidates outside of a narrow portion of the Republican Party: I remember their upset in 2008 over Huckabee's early strong performances.

There is a more damaging account from Powerline, where an apparent supporter is backing off of her candidacy over the matter.

Up to now I’ve thought Michele Bachman was the most impressive performer in the GOP field, going toe-to-toe with the “big boys” in the field, out-arguing them on several occasions, and introducing serious constitutional arguments that the rest of the field (even Perry) are too timid to attempt. She’s right to go after Rick Perry on the issue of mandating the use of the Gardisil vaccine, along with the issue of “crony capitalism,” both of which get at the issue of a potential president’s sense of the reach and limits of state power. Perry is a mixed bag on this (as is Romney obviously) and he should be pressed hard to explain himself and refine his views.

But her embrace of the wacko idea that the vaccine is dangerous or causes autism, mental retardation, or other risks is simply irresponsible.

The post is titled "Giving up on Bachmann," which is a farther step than I would take at this time. The very facts he cites are reason enough to explain why. We have already reached a stage in the election at which the President of 2013 is going to be one of four or perhaps five people. We are well beyond the point at which we can imagine an ideal candidate, and are now choosing among a narrow menu. Of the four likely options, I would rank them roughly as follows:

1) Rep. Bachmann
2) Gov. Perry
3) Pres. Obama
4) Former Gov. Romney

Romney comes in last for me because, on the merits, he is very close to President Obama; but he would have two terms, and an incumbent's advantage in 2016. If we cannot win this election for whatever reason, it would be better to accept four years of a lame-duck of proven ineffectiveness than risk eight years of a potentially more effective politician of the same general type.

Nevertheless, this is an important moment in judging whether Rep. Bachmann will be fit for the office. I have some sympathy for anyone who is tired of being told that a given position is unacceptable politically because 'the science is settled'; the claim misunderstands the nature of science, which is never settled, and should not be accepted on authority. I'm willing to give the Representative time to work through the issue carefully, allowing for the duties of her office and the rigors of the campaign.

Still, when she has had that time, we will need to see that she can accept and properly evaluate new evidence on the merits. That will be an important feature of a President.

AttackWatch

While I agree that this sort of thing is both ugly and improper, I think it shows a remarkable sense of optimism by the President's re-election team. After all, look at the mission statement:

"Forming the first line of defense against a barrage of misinformation won't be easy," Messina wrote in a fundraising email to campaign supporters. "Our success will depend on a team of researchers and writers to stay on the lookout for false claims about the President and his record, bring you the facts, and hold our opposition accountable."

It's sort of charming that they still believe that the chief danger to the President's re-election hopes is "false claims" about the President's record. In fairness, I suppose, the 2008 election featured a tremendous number of such charges -- not about then-Senator Obama especially, but also pointed at then-Senator Clinton and then-Governor Palin.

2008 was an election without an incumbent, though. There's a lot less room for that sort of thing against a sitting President, who is going to be pretty well known by everyone. President Obama's opponents may be subject to false charges or revisionist attacks on what was previously accepted by everyone; but the President himself, for better or worse, is not going to face that problem. He is going to have to run against what people know about him, not what they merely believe.

Curses

I'm not sure what exactly has happened, except that Blogger appears to have decided to force the blog into some new template. Apparently the existing format was lost entirely. It doesn't seem to be reading the old Haloscan data for comments, either.

I don't know if I can fix this, or if we are stuck with it. I may have to learn the new system, which I hate doing. There was no notification or anything; but you get what you pay for, I guess, and Blogger is free.

UPDATE: I've done the best I can with it, with the time I have. It uses a kind of code I don't happen to know, rather than the old style HTML. Until I have time to learn the new code, the color-changing feature is broken. I set it to the burgundy color because of T99's very strong preference for it. I'm working on trying to import the old comments into a new commenting system called Disqus. I was able to export them from the old Echo system, but we'll see if I can get them re-loaded properly. Some bloggers seem to have had success doing so, though.