How The FBI Got Hacked

Apparently the window of vulnerability that allowed a secret FBI phone call to be recorded was the hacking of a personal, private email account.  Login information for the call, emailed to the agent's account, thus came into the hands of the hacking community.

Over the last few years, I've talked with a few experts in the field of digital communication security.  The password issue issue is a problem they often talk about; what they usually are aiming towards instead is a way of identifying the particular computer or phone that is in operation.  Then, even if you had the password, you couldn't call in without the right phone as well:  the other phones wouldn't accept your connection.

There's a lot going on in the field, and I think we'll see some pretty major advances over the next year or so.  I doubt it will end the hacking, though:  it will make it much harder, but a lot of hackers are motivated chiefly by the challenge.  Others, of course, like knowing secrets, and still others like to pull pranks on authority figures.  I've met a few good ones, though, whose real interest was just in doing something that was supposed to be impossible.

One fellow I knew got a job with a major corporation as the head of computer security for their nuclear facilities by hacking into their database and scheduling a job interview for himself.  They were very confused when he showed up for it, apologizing that they didn't seem to have any of the usual paperwork on hand, and weren't sure why an interview had been scheduled without the usual process of review.  After he explained how the interview had gotten scheduled, they hired him.

The story reminds me of that of philosopher and logician Saul Kripke, who was hired as a professor of philosophy without any degree in philosophy at all.

While still a teenager he wrote a series of papers that eventually transformed the study of modal logic. One of them, or so the legend goes, earned a letter from the math department at Harvard, which hoped he would apply for a job until he wrote back and declined, explaining, "My mother said that I should finish high school and go to college first." 

The college he eventually chose was Harvard. "I wish I could have skipped college," Mr. Kripke said in an interview. "I got to know some interesting people, but I can't say I learned anything. I probably would have learned it all anyway, just reading on my own." 

While still a Harvard undergrad, Mr. Kripke started teaching post-graduates down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after getting his B.A. didn't bother to acquire an advanced degree. Who could teach him anything he didn't already know? Instead, he began teaching and publishing. 

 Princeton hired him as a professor, even though their usual standards required a doctorate as a minimum prerequisite.  It was a good decision.

Approval

Rough stuff in politics today.  Sometimes you bring it on yourself:

[Mark Steyn said] "For a start, when he says, ‘I am my brother’s keeper,’ his brother is back in Kenya living on $12 a year. That’s what he was living on at the time of the 2008 election. So all the president has to do in terms of shared responsibility is put a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it to Nairobi or Mombasa or wherever and he will double his brother’s salary.”

Sometimes you gripe about being taken out of context, only to discover that your remarks are just as bad in context:

“We now know from Gov. Romney, he joins President Obama. Obama is big food stamp, he’s little food stamp – but they both think food stamps are OK,” Gingrich said. “I don’t think food stamps are a future for America. They’re a necessary bridge back to getting a job and back to being independent of the government.”

Sadly, when you say that you aren't concerned about the poor because of the safety net, you're open to that line.

Of course, sometimes the context that makes you look bad is provided by someone else:



Great ad, except for the last few seconds.  It's a compelling argument against Mr. Romney; but it offers no reason to vote for Mr. Gingrich.

Well, Of Course They Would:

Business Insider wades into a controversy by noticing that the Susan G. Komen Foundation, though no longer willing to associate with Planned Parenthood, is willing to partner with a handgun manufacturer.

This gun is a beauty.  

And a portion of the sale of each P-22 Hope Edition will be donated to the Seattle Branch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

So, why would they do this?  Two reasons:

1)  The pistol is a fundraiser for them.  Planned Parenthood was an expense.  An entirely different set of criteria are involved in opting into a program that makes money for your charity, versus opting out of an expense.

2)  It's target pistol -- .22 LR, with interchangable barrels so that it can simulate a real self-defense weapon, or be set up for formal match-style target shooting.  The only people who would find a pink .22 LR pistol threatening are squirrels.  (Squirrels are people too, right, PETA?)

UPDATE:  Looks to be moot now; the SGK Foundation has caved to the pressure brought by the abortion lobby.

Madness

There’s an educational video from that time, called “Understanding Asperger’s,” in which I appear. I am the affected 20-year-old in the wannabe-hipster vintage polo shirt talking about how keen his understanding of literature is and how misunderstood he was in fifth grade. The film was a research project directed by my mother, a psychology professor and Asperger specialist, and another expert in her department. It presents me as a young man living a full, meaningful life, despite his mental abnormality. 

“Understanding Asperger’s” was no act of fraud. Both my mother and her colleague believed I met the diagnostic criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

No act of fraud?  To say that it was an honest application of the rules of psychology is no defense from that charge.  You would better say that your mother was as taken by the fraud as everyone else.  Say that she was even more a victim than were you, for she gave her life to it.

Flowers in February

The winds in Georgia are coming off the Gulf of Mexico this winter, so that the air is warm.  It's good weather for the road.

We took the bike up to northeast Georgia and western North Carolina.  The mountains are still bare, so that the rocks and waterfalls are easily seen from a great distance.  Nevertheless there is proof of life in the warm winter.

The Methodist Church in Clayton, Georgia.  Clayton is an increasingly fun town, with an outstanding hardware store (featuring archery, guns, camping gear, and the lot), and several good restaurants and bars.  One of the bars is built out of a refinished service station, called "The Universal Joint."  Camp at Black Rock Mountain, a thousand feet above, and you'll hear them rocking down below.

So much for the city.  Beyond, in the Wild, flowers grow.

Georgia Veronica Blue, one of our native glories.

Nandina berries, which are not native but invasive.  "All parts of the plant are poisonous."  It's also known as 'sacred bamboo.'

Daffodils in wintertime.  These broke out on the last day of January this year.

Some Old Posts, Newly Relevant

I find to my surprise that I have a post on Rick Santorum from 2005.  It arises from an article quite critical of him.

Also, chiefly for Cassandra, an old post on Democratic purges and the danger they posed to the party.  I came down on what I take to be her side; but the year was 2006, and the Democrats did well in the next two elections.  Maybe 2010 was the point at which purging the ideologically impure began to harm them; but I doubt it, all things considered.

So, my analysis was wrong:  but why was it wrong?  Do the facts imply that purges were helpful in achieving the wave elections of 2006 and 2008?  Or are they just irrelevant, noise in the face of greater matters?  If so, what are the consequences of that?

Troll Valley Comes to Life

Lars Walker proves prescient.  My favorite scene in Troll Valley was this one, where the prohibitionist is haranguing dissenters in her family by reading pro-temperance newspaper clips at breakfast, and commanding approval of the sentiments.  One morning she read a letter to an editor:

"I would like to relate an incident that occurred on the approach of my youngest daughter's eighth birthday," the correspondent said.  "Upon my inquiring of the innocent what she desired as a gift for the impending celebration, she looked at me with grave, ingenuous blue eyes and said, 'Mother, what I would like most is to see the ratification of Prohibition.'  Think what sorrow was mine to be compelled to inform her that we must await the pleasure of our legislators before this blessing can be ours!  It is apparent to the most obtuse that even the babes in arms are alive to the necessity of the reform of our civilization.  How much longer must they live in fear of the drunkard and his madness?  For our children's sake, we must drive Rum from our shores." 

Mother sighed. "Have you ever heard a more touching story?" she asked. 

Bestefar shook his head.  "I think any child who says she wants Prohibition for her birthday will probably steal as well as lie." 

Mother's cheeks flamed.  "What a wicked thing to say!"

Bestefar was right, of course.  However, the trick doesn't only work on parents longing for the reform of our civilization; it can work on parents of the defenders, too.

Quit Unsettling That Science!

The House Committee on Un-American Activities, that is, the "Forecast the Facts" website, is on a mission to purge the TV weatherman community of dirty denialists and present the viewing public with pure and approved scientific views on Global Climate Whatever. I was surprised to learn that a solid majority of TV weathermen privately harbor heretical skepticism about the role of humankind and/or CO2 in harming Gaia. Almost a quarter of them now are prepared to come right out and call AGW a "scam" in off-the-air polls. This must be stopped! As the creepy blog ThinkProgress puts it:

These climate denier meteorologists are betraying the public’s trust and distorting America’s airwaves with ideological science denial.

The chief meterologist for a Houston TV station explains that more humility is in order:

Operational meteorologists and forecasters are not climatologists. The background education is somewhat similar, but our area of expertise is different. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop some TV weather forecasters from spouting off on the subject.

But hey, if you believe in AGW, go ahead and spout off. You owe it to your viewers to get the truth out! Activists point out that "when a region is in the midst of a drought or heat wave, it is important to discuss the role climate change plays in amplifying such an event." When a region in in the midst of wet or cold weather, though, apparently it is important to stress that climate is not the same as weather, or to explain that anthropogenic CO2 levels can lead to climate disruption of every conceivable variety, by an undiscovered mechanism that nevertheless is completely settled.

Well, our confidence in the information we get from the TV weatherman could hardly be affected one way or another by the amount of nonsense they spout about the "science" of long-term climate trend analysis. Just the website title "Forecast the Facts" should alert the reader of the odd confusion in the mainstream climate community over the difference between facts and predictive models. Last Friday's document dump included a painful admission from the UK's national weather service, dubbed the "Met Office," that the latest warming trend stopped cold in 1997, apparently as a result of changes in sunspot activity. The Met Office didn't sit still for this politically incorrect interpretation of the stubborn facts, though. It explained that right-thinking scientists understand that a predicted severe drop in the Sun's activity, perhaps rivaling the "Maunder minimum" of 300 years ago, might indeed cause the Thames to freeze over again, but for some reason would likely prove to be a strictly local effect, leaving the rest of the globe to endure continued warming. Remember, don't try to do this scientific thinking at home. Leave it to the experts.

Bloody Gay Pride Parades?

I woke this morning to find the Net all a-twitter over Governor Christie's proposal to place same-sex marriage up for a vote on the New Jersey November ballot. Christie inflamed progressives by suggesting that the Civil Rights movement might have been better served by confining itself to the ballot box rather in favor of physical confrontation:

The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.

Like New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver erupted in fury over the idea of putting basic civil rights up for a popular vote:

Gov. Christie better sit down with some of New Jersey’s great teachers for a history lesson, because his puzzling comment shows a complete misunderstanding about the civil rights movement. . . . It’s impossible to ever conceive that a referendum on civil rights in the South would have been successful and brought justice to minorities. It’s unfathomable to even suggest a referendum would have been the better course. . . . Governor –- people were fighting and dying in the streets of the South for a reason. They were fighting and dying in the streets of the South because the majority refused to grant minorities equal rights by any method. It look legislative action to bring justice to all Americans, just as legislative action is the right way to bring marriage equality to all New Jerseyans. The governor’s comment is an insult to those who had no choice but to fight and die in the streets for equal rights.

Oliver appears a bit confused about history herself. If it took "legislative action" to address the problem, isn't that closer to a solution by referendum than by violence? Perhaps what she's thinking is that the legislative action never would have happened if it hadn't been spurred by violence. Christie's opposing suggestion is that putting the issue to a popular vote early on might have removed the need for the violence. It's never easy to know when people must burst out of the system into personal rebellion or even violence in order to protect their essential freedoms, as our host so often suggests is our duty. Oliver sounds like a woman who needs to think about that dilemma more carefully.

My guess is that Oliver really is trying to argue that legislative action sometimes has to be imposed from outside the local jurisdiction, because the local majority can't be trusted to vote for justice for an oppressed minority. Or she may be suggesting that legislators are wiser than the unwashed public that elects them. If she were sorting through her issues more thoughtfully, she might even argue that nationwide majorities are not always trustworthy, and therefore legislative solutions must give way to judicial, Constitutional action if proponents of same-sex marriage are to obtain real relief.

In the meantime, does Ms. Oliver really want to argue that gays should take up arms rather than work with the system to obtain the rights they believe are due to them?

A second wave of twittering followed Christie's calling a gay lawmaker a "numbnuts," presumably a hate crime. I like this Christie guy, even if at one time he didn't have any more sense than to believe in non-heliocentric cosmic climate metaphysics, or at least to try to take advantage of the tax revenues it might generate for his strapped state.

Glory and Destiny

The University of Georgia has a long and storied history, being one of the claimants to the title of oldest public college in the United States.  So it is no surprise to see another extraordinary story from that institution, featuring a young lady of wisdom and character.  Also, fairly impressive biceps.

A deeply religious junior exercise and sports science major, Watson was on the brink of a $75,000 fitness-modeling contract that could have set her up for a lifetime career in modeling -- but she turned it down.... A modeling agent wanted her to use Anavar, a legal anabolic steroid to help her gain up to 50 pounds of muscle. Worried about the effects on her body when she decides to have kids, Watson passed.

There stands some discerning judgment, for one so young.  That's glory.

This is destiny:

She can bench press 155 pounds, squat 255 pounds and dead lift 230 pounds. 

I could do more than that the first day I walked into the gym.  That's nothing in praise of me or against her.  Her muscles show a better 'cut' and appearance.  I'm in fairly good shape, but nobody is going to offer me a fitness-modeling contract.  She has clearly developed virtues of moderation, temperance and wisdom.  It's just a fact.

She's spent a lifetime training to develop muscle and strength, and is probably among the strongest women in America.  Nevertheless, there it is.  This is the sort of thing we increasingly tend to ignore when making determinations about military policy, but it's real enough.  As we cut military budgets, especially in ground forces, we'll be less able to compensate for weaker soldiers in other ways.  It's not just about the weight you can lift and carry; there's the injury problem, too.  By the way, Ms. Watson is out of service due to damage to her Achilles tendon right now.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for women and their contribution to society and the military.  I have often written about how much I appreciate the contribution of American servicewomen in Iraq, where I had the honor to serve with some outstanding ones.  In no way do I wish to detract from the glory of a woman who strives to do her best.  We just have to be clear-eyed about this business, because things are going to get harder for our warriors as the money dries up.

Changing A Name

Good to hear Arlo Guthrie is still singing relevant music.



Of course this is the song of his that gets sung most often around here:

"A Miraculous Turnaround"

I am glad to hear that Mr. Santorum's daughter Bella has enjoyed something of a recovery from the pneumonia that afflicted her.  I was not aware of her other, lifelong, condition until the stories of the weekend.  It's extraordinary to see a family accepting such challenges these days, living with them, and finding strength for pursuing and achieving in the broader world in spite of them.

This morning Michelle Malkin declared for Santorum.  She has a fairly thorough listing of her reasons, and considerations both for and against him.  I don't normally read Ms. Malkin -- I saw her endorsement linked on Memeorandum -- but it is good to see one of the big players join in on his side.

UPDATE:  Santorum gave a pitch in Minnesota at which he was asked how he would win among moderates.  That's been a challenge to him raised here, too, so you might be interested in his answer.

Only toward the end did a process question get asked, when a caller politely challenged Santorum to explain how he’d win moderates.  Santorum replied that moderates don’t tend to be issues voters, but respond to enthusiasm and momentum, and that the important task was to rally the base as happened in the midterms.  Neither Romney or Gingrich are consistently conservative enough to do that, Santorum argued, while his record gave the GOP the best chance to stoke conservative enthusiasm.  He also said that he had a track record in Pennsylvania of winning Reagan Democrats, which he would do throughout the Rust Belt and Midwest.  “Will I lose California by a wider margin than Romney?” Santorum asked, and replied that he certainly would — but losing California and New York by a marginally smaller amount won’t do the GOP any good in November anyway.  Santorum insisted that he could do better in the center of the country than any other Republican, and that would make the difference in November.

Good Luck

Bad news at a bad time for a reasonably good man, as politicians go.  I hope it gets better fast.

Friction

In Beyond Good and Evil, Neitzsche scribed a warning: "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

In fighting evil, there is a grave peril that you may be called upon to do terrible things.  It changes you.

But this works both ways. 

A Bowie Would Have Done It, Too:

Today's headline:  "Cleaver aids woman in trouble."

Akbar Case Being Litigated

Here's a limited-time opportunity for people interested in death penalty litigation. Next week, the Army Court of Criminal Appeals is hearing oral arguments in the case of United States v. Hasan K. Akbar. I assume the lead character needs no introduction here.

Well, I follow their website occasionally (a few of my clients, of whom Akbar isn't one, may get relief there in the next year or two). And I see that nowadays, when they're going to have oral arguments, that page sometimes includes links to the briefs. They've done so in Akbar's case. I expect those links will go down on 1 February, when the oral arguments are done, but in the meantime anyone who wishes can pop over there and read the briefs.

I haven't tried a capital case. In fact, I haven't tried a murder at all, and I'm not going to talk here about the cases I have tried. (Some were certainly disturbing enough.) But I know just a little about appellate work and that capital appeals don't look like other appeals. One thing you'll notice, if you take a read through, is that the defense raises a lot of issues, including many that (according to the government brief) were decided decades ago, and not in the defense's favor. This makes a kind of sense. If you know the appeals could go on for decades, the composition of all the courts could change (the Supreme Court included), and they could reverse themselves on dozens of issues that have already been decided. You don't want to waive those issues by failing to raise them. So I can't blame the lawyers for writing their brief that way. Neither should you. (Though you might wish, as I do, that these appeals didn't go on for so long.) In other kinds of case, the ideal is "a rifle, not a shotgun" - make a few points and argue them in depth, and don't waste time with the oddball or the obsolete.

A few notes for anyone who cares to do some wading through --

The page includes the links but not the evidentiary exhibits, let alone the record of trial. The government brief makes frequent references to "GAE 1" (Government Appellate Exhibit 1). This is almost certainly an affidavit from one of Akbar's trial attorneys. Normally, a lawyer's duty of confidentiality continues unbroken after trial, and he will often decline to explain his decisions, as they may relate to things his client told him in private, or information that has not come to light and that would not be good for the client. But if the client is claiming ineffective assistance of counsel (a common thing in capital litigation), the lawyer is partly released from that duty. He can reveal confidential things, but only insofar as is needed to defend himself against the charge of ineffective assistance (if he was really that bad, that has some serious implications for his career and maybe his license). So if the client claims on appeal, "My stupid lawyer didn't pay attention when I told him about my rough childhood" - the lawyer can write an affidavit saying, "Oh, yes I did, and I didn't raise it in court because it would convince the judge you were broken beyond repair and should be locked up for life" - or whatever. Anyway, this is why the government appellate lawyers are writing as if they know so much about what the trial defense attorneys were thinking.

Only one part of the briefs made me raise my eyebrows - page 68 of the appellee (government)'s first brief. "Mrs. Nerad" is an expert in mitigation in death cases, one of several hired for the defense in that case:

Furthermore, trial defense counsel did not agree with Ms. Nerad's philosophy that "a mitigation investigation was effectively endless and that it was her practice to always request more time and more funding until the state government relented on pursuing the death penalty. If the government did not relent, then, according to Mrs. Nerad,
there would be a built in appellate issue.

In the footnote, the appellate counsel takes a nasty little swipe to say that "Ms. Nerad's strategy is exactly what [Akbar] has placed before this court." The way I was brought up, you don't make that kind of accusation against the other side - at least, not without some very powerful proof. Think it, yes. Say it, no. (And in a death case, there are solid reasons for litigating very differently than in other kinds, as I mentioned before.)

Anyway, if you'd like a little insight into that case that isn't filtered through the press, and you have some time, there's your chance.

The Devil You Know

...When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

Ron Paul Gets the Best Lines

Watching tonight's debates, I have these impressions:

Ron Paul gets all the best lines.  He's still not a serious candidate, but man it's fun to listen to him talk.

Rick Santorum is playing it straight, but there's nothing flashy about his answers.  They're honest, though.  He's probably not helping himself by hammering all the things he's not going to do for people.  There are some applause lines associated with these things, but... well, I hope it works.  His answer about his wife was fantastic.

Newt Gingrich gives the best answers across the board.  Whatever else there is to be said about him, the guy knows his stuff.  Whenever they come after him, he knows just how to turn it around.  When Romney came after him for promising stuff state-by-state, he gave a great answer.  He also took a couple of moments to give kind words to Dr. Paul over his age and health, which was courteous.

Romney just said he'd like to fire someone again, but the audience didn't seem to mind.  His answer on health reform was pretty good.  "Groundhog Day" was a good line; interesting that he followed it up by saying that "we know what it takes to get you back to work."  We?  Good for you, governor.

UPDATE:  Santorum's answer about faith was very good.  'The Constitution is the how of America.  It is the operator's manual.  The why of America is the Declaration of Independence.  We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.' His was the most unapologetic endorsement of faith in public life.

UPDATE:  Hot Air disagrees that Gingrich was strong; I thought he turned the knives very well, but it's true that Santorum went after Romney more.  But see for yourself:

Romney neutralized him on the big immigration exchange at the beginning, and then it fell to Santorum — for the second debate in a row — to pick Romney apart on his core policy vulnerability. (He did a darned fine job of it too.) If you’re operating under the illusion that the election will turn on the presidential debates in October, kindly explain why Gingrich is somehow superior to Santorum. He wouldn’t even accept Blitzer’s invite to hit Romney on his Swiss bank account even though he’s been criticizing him on the trail for it for days. The hapless moderator/punching bag had to practically badger him into answering. I don’t get it. Didn’t he realize that the primary was on the line tonight? 

You’ll be pleased to know that Romney is now a 91 percent favorite to win on InTrade as I write this, up from 74 percent earlier today. Stats guru Nate Silver thinks it’s possible that Romney wins by double digits, perhaps as much as 20 points. And why not? After Santorum’s strong performance tonight, there are bound to be tepid Newt fans and true undecideds who prefer him as the anointed Not Romney to Gingrich. Who could blame them?

Be nice to see the boy do well.

Speaking of Character

...our VP definitely is one.

UPDATE:  Apparently FOXNews decided to change their headline on this one, and the URL changed with it.  The new page questions whether Biden faked an Indian accent, rather than asserting that he did.  I'm leaving the old link up, though, because as Sly says, the 404 page is amusing in itself.

A Problem from the Rhetoric

Aristotle makes a claim in the early part of the Rhetoric that seems like it ought to be the case, and yet is clearly out of order with the facts on the ground here in America today.

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. This kind of persuasion, like the others, should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak. It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.

That seems like it ought to be right.  Yet in our current Presidential contest, we have one man who is apparently good by general standards, which is to say Rick Santorum, the lowest-polling figure in the race; one man who is apparently not good, but who is a highly effective speaker, which is to say Newt Gingrich; one man who may or may not be good, but is a terrible speaker, which is to say Mitt Romney; and one man who is said by some to be good and others to be wicked, and by some to be a great speaker and by others to be a terrible one, but who is currently the actual victor of the last Presidential contest.

I say that Romney 'may or may not' be of good character; Cassandra is quite sure he is of excellent character, and his personal life seems to be clear of the usual problems, but I can't quite figure him out well enough to decide what to think about his motives.

Aristotle's next argument ends up making perfect sense from our contemporary perspective.

There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and describe them, to know their causes and the way in which they are excited.

There is a clear failure for Romney on point (3). Thus, assuming the man to be of excellent personal character for the sake of argument, we can still appreciate how he might fail to be persuasive.  He lacks one of the three basic components of effectiveness in persuasion.

Newt clearly has (1), (2), and (3) down.  His reasoning is good, he understands human character and goodness (even if he often fails to practice it), and he knows how to excite the emotions.

Thus, we would expect Newt to prevail in a two-man contest of persuasion:  he's simply better armed.  This will prove to be true in the fall as well:  when imagining a Newt v. Obama match-up versus a Romney v. Obama match-up, we can see that the President will fare better rhetorically in the latter contest.  He would be facing an opponent who simply lacks access to a third of the power of persuasion.

We still have the puzzle of goodness, though.  I have always found that speaking the truth is the greatest weapon in rhetoric, and that good character and a name for honor is -- as Aristotle holds -- a powerful weapon as well.  That does not appear to be the case for us today.

Does this mean that Americans do not care about good character, or that they disagree about what it is?  Or is there something about our electoral process that makes character less persuasive than it normally tends to be?  If the latter, what is the cause of the failure?

Mass Grave in England

Now a University of Cambridge researcher is putting forward a compelling new theory about the identity of the murder victims. The documentary follows Dr Britt Baillie, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, as she examines the remains, as well as documents from the period and other material evidence, to reopen the file on what happened in Dorset a thousand years ago. 

While historians will probably never agree conclusively about who the men were, Baillie’s analysis draws her to the conclusion that they may have been Viking mercenaries who modelled themselves on, or behaved in a similar way to the legendary Jomsvikings – a brotherhood of elite killers whose strict military code involved never showing fear, and never fleeing in the face of the enemy unless totally outnumbered. 

Allegedly founded by Harald Bluetooth, the Jomsvikings are thought to have been based at a stronghold called Jomsborg on the Baltic coast. At a time when Vikings were feared across Europe, they were known as perhaps the fiercest of them all – a reputation which even earned them their own saga.

Uh, Oh, I'm a Cultural Elitist

I'm no Pauline Kael, but I guess I'm not exactly a woman of the people, either, according to this Pop Quiz inspired by Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." I get a few points for having done a little manual labor and having once ridden on a Greyhound bus. On some questions you get credit for your spouse's activity, such as buying a pickup truck, but for hunting and fishing I guess it counts only if you do it yourself. Well, at least I have friends who are evangelical Christians and/or who disagree with me profoundly on political issues. So my score is "You can see through your bubble, but you need to get out more." I could have done better if I'd ever sat through an Oprah show or watched last year's Transformer movie. But no credit for enjoying Jeff Foxworthy? For frequenting Sonic drive-ins?

I knew I was in trouble when out-of-touch Michelle Obama took flack for buying Tuscan kale in a local farmer's market. We grow Tuscan kale and think it's great stuff.

H/t Ace of Spades.

Can This Be Right?

Inflation adjustment is a little tricky, but this still seems like a strange claim:

However, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post finds that controlling for inflation, in fact George Washington would be the nation’s richest president.... In today’s dollars, Washington’s net worth would amount to more than $500 million.

I'm not after the basic claim of the article, which is that we've had a lot of presidents richer than Romney would be if elected.  What interests me is the claim that George Washington was fantastically rich.  I had never gotten that concept from readings of history.  What I thought I understood was that he began quite modestly, as a surveyor -- I've been to places he surveyed, including the town in Virginia that now bears his name.  His marriage to Martha Custis brought him some wealth, and his status as a war hero made it possible for him to obtain more, but I thought he was in debt for a long time after that, nearly until the war started.

That seems to be in accord with the Wikipedia article, which notes:

After retiring from the presidency in March 1797, Washington returned to Mount Vernon with a profound sense of relief. He devoted much time to farming and other business interests, including his distillery which produced its first batch of spirits in February 1797.  As Chernow (2010) explains, his farm operations were at best marginally profitable. The lands out west yielded little income because they were under attack by Indians and the squatters living there refused to pay him rents. However most Americans assumed he was truly rich because of the well-known "glorified façade of wealth and grandeur" at Mount Vernon.  Historians estimate his estate was worth about $1 million in 1799 dollars, equivalent to about $18 million in 2009 purchasing power.

Eighteen million dollars is still quite rich, but it's nowhere near $500 million.  Is the Washington Post as bad with numbers as everyone else in D.C., or is there some way of making sense of the claim?

A Man or a Mouse?

It seems many Americans perked up when they heard Mitch Daniels's opposition speech after the State of the Union, prompting a heated debate over whether a dark horse could enter the race at this late date. At Pajamas Media, Ron Radosh explains some of the pros and cons of this gambit, but it's the comments section I find most interesting. I had forgotten that Daniels cited his wife's opposition as his reason for giving up the campaign, and that his wife had left him to marry her high school sweetheart, then returned to remarry him ten years later, after he'd earned millions of dollars. To many voters, this apparently marks him as a Beta Man unsuited for the Oval Office.

I don't doubt that that's a common reaction. It's not quite mine. His wife's high school sweetheart was a California plastic surgeon who ditched her after a few years in favor of a younger model. The picture I get is of a woman who made a horrible mistake by choosing a flashy passionate poseur, then came to her senses and realized that the stolid father of her children was the real man. To her great good fortune, he still cared for her and wanted to repair their family. In my eyes, that makes her a reformed liberal, and it makes him a strong man who knows his own heart. There's someone home in there. (Contrast with Ace's piechart of the most common reasons for supporting a candidate:)

Anyway, it's a narrative I prefer over the guy who keeps screwing around on his wife, marrying his mistress, and then doing it again.

What the heck is the matter with the GOP that it can't produce a candidate with a nice, conventional home life who also knows how to translate his personal, economic, and political principles into coherent policy proposals? You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Then I wake up when I read sensible advice like this from commenter "Patrick in Atlantis":

We’re trying to thin the field out, not grow it. If Daniels get in the race now, he’ll have his you know what handed to him. You don’t like any of the contestants? Too bad.

Elberton

Elberton, Georgia, is an interesting place.  The wealth of the city is based on granite, quarries, that sort of thing.  But the history is important.

We went to the McIntosh Coffee shop.  Nice place.  Good prices for lunch, if you wanted lunch.

Georgia's district tartan -- recognized by Scotland's King of Arms, on the sidebar -- is based on the MacIntosh tartan.  I guess a lot of folks don't know that anymore.  John "Mohr" MacIntosh -- that is, 'John the Great' -- was brought to the south of Savannah after the '45.  He was there with Oglethorpe for the wars that kept Georgia and the Carolinas for the English, against the Spanish.  

The post road has run through there since the Washington administration.  It's kind of funny to think that we're looking at the end of the postal service, and to remember just how long it's been around.  Not that long:  two hundred years and change.  It was new in France in the 1600s; Dumas made a point of the novelty in The Three Musketeers.  

Took My Own Advice Today...

Went out to detox from the internet.  The few little towns around here are pretty disconnected from the internet-world, as demonstrated by our most-local pet store:

Hey, I didn't make it up!  I just took the picture.

Do I Hear Twenty Percent? Going Once...

Maybe We Need a Brokered Convention to Get This Guy Back in the Race

From Mitch Daniel's rebuttal to the 2012 (as well as the 2011 and 2010) SOTU address:

An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.

The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.

Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say "First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love."

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Private sector jobs. That's where everything starts, and that's what everything else hangs from.

The Roman Internet

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a surprising historical metaphor for the difficulties we face in making good use of the Internet.

The metaphor is Nero's court, and the model for success is one Gaius Petronius Arbiter.  He is supposed to be the guide for how to deal with these massive feasts without being numbed by them.  The model is better than the others around Nero's court; and yet, as the end of the piece shows, ought to be deeply alarming.  Decadence has a high price for even the best human soul.

I'm thinking about this in terms of last weekend's forced detachment from the world.  Along about Sunday, I realized that there must be some interesting news about how the South Carolina primary had gone -- the matter was much debated the week before, and here it had been over and done with and I had no idea how it had turned out.  Instead I was rereading a work of history on an old Anglo-Saxon blood feud, and enjoying it.  I had forgotten the author's insights into how Northumbria was divided, and how that fit into the question of feuds and politics in the generation before the Norman Conquest.

It may be that the real answer is not in refinement of decadence, but in periodic detoxification.  I like to take to the road at times in the year, and go for a while into the mountains or some wilderness.  It is always good, but much of the year it is not available -- we are expected to remain connected at all times for professional reasons.  I have managed to resist this more than many, but even I feel often required to be abreast of the situation, the latest detail.

The table groans, and so do we.

The End of the Grand Old Party

Foreshadowed tonight in a comment by a "Top Romney Advisor":



So the argument here is that party elites will let you vote for Romney or, if you won't, they'll simply remove the decision from your hands.  Romney won't get their nod, and neither will Gingrich, nor anyone else who has won delegates out of the votes of the people.  The party and not the voters will decide.

The Democrats got this result in 2008.  Do you remember?  The debate was over whether some states -- Clinton-won states -- would be allowed to vote their full slate, or if they would have to accept limited or no participation in the convention.  Then-Senator Clinton's campaign made a big deal about counting every vote.  When the convention came, though, she took the Secretary of State position instead of forcing a contest; and they ended up counting none of the votes, but nominating then-Senator Obama by acclamation.

We have watched the capture of the Democratic party by public-sector unions, the vastly rich corporate powers that support the unions, and their dogs in the New Class who make up the leadership of the Occupy movements.  It's destroyed a party that meant a lot to America over the course of its history; it meant something to me.  I fought for it for a long time, even in twilight.

I've never been a Republican, and the fate of that party is of no special interest to me.  All the same, it seems like someone ought to say this:  the Republican party isn't like what the Democratic party has become.  If they pull the trigger on this, and set aside the voters for the will of their internal elites, they will lose everything.

This is because the base of the Republican party is middle America, and middle America won't accept this.  The success of the Gingrich campaign to date is predicated on their hatred of the party elites.  Deny them the power to vote for their leadership and their representatives, and they will come looking for heads.

Perhaps that is for the best.  What we need is a genuinely populist revolt against the political class, and the removal of all those who rest in easy seats of power.  Perhaps in the aftermath of what was once the Republican party, we can build a movement that will break the chains of eighty years of submission to the state, to the powerful, and to the guidance of those said to be wiser than we.

Wergeld

Can we agree that, if a man kills someone's family pet over a political campaign, and that man is later hunted down and killed, we will all pledge not to convict the killer of any crime if asked to serve on the jury?

Living in bubbles

Charles Murray has a new book out, and an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizing its argument. He maintains that the richest and the poorest Americans are more isolated from the rest of their culture than they were 50 years ago. He suggests that, for their own benefit, they'd both do well to break out. To the inhabitants of the decaying low-income, low-education areas, he recommends:

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

To the sheltered inhabitants of the "SuperZIPs," those giant gated communities near New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, he recommends rethinking their priorities:

Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Most people won't listen to Mr. Murray. In order to strip out results that can be explained by ethnicity or racism, he looks strictly at statistics relating to white people. His ideas in this new book, like the ones in the past several, will therefore be dismissed as racism.

Something like the same sorting trend was described in Bill Bishop's 2009 "The Big Sort," a book that I found unsatisfying. Bishop was persuasive in his statistics about the clumping of like-minded communities, as revealed in fine-grained analysis of changing voting habits over a number of election cycles. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to know what to make of the data, other than to bemoan the increasing difficulty of civil discussions about deep political disagreements. Also, while he thoroughly understood why nice people would naturally congregate in progressive neighborhoods in his own in Austin, Texas, he seemed a little bemused about what all those Americans in red precincts could be thinking.

Mr. Murray, in contrast, has done a lot of analysis over several decades about how much more efficiently our education system now works to sort out Americans by I.Q. I was surprised to read (in "The Bell Curve"), for instance, how relatively recently the Ivy Leagues began moving toward a fairly strict meritocracy. Before 1960, they demanded a moderate minimum level of scholasticism and then mostly sorted by money and class. Back then, the brightest students from flyover country were far more likely to attend local schools and stay in their home towns performing a variety of jobs, rather than gravitate to Wall Street or the Mayo Clinic as they tend to do today.

Our neighborhood is very mixed in education and income. We like it that way.

Cruise liner

The Net brims with explanations of how Romney could have blown South Carolina, but as usual my favorite comes from Mark Steyn:

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive. . . . Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

Well, if he loses the nomination, maybe Romney can shoot for EU president.

P.S. -- but I'll still vote for him if he wins the nomination. A.B.O.

Rainfall

Due to the torrential downpours of the last several days, we've been without phone or Internet since Saturday.  It's working currently, but it's also still raining, so we'll see how long it lasts!  The rain has also made some of the local roads impassable, meaning that I've had the interesting experience of being entirely shut off for the world for a few days.

Did I miss anything?

Crazy

Cassandra reminds me in the post below that it's been too long since I did something really wrong.  A man has to sin once in a while, or else he'll get to feeling self-righteous, which is the worse sin than the sin he put off.

So here.  It's for the health of our souls.



You think that's bad?  Try this:

An Interesting Day for Republicans

It looks like Newt Gingrich is about to have his best day on the campaign trail...

...and also his worst.

It's rare to get so many big stories all at once.  It's hard to say how it will shake out.  Here are a few possibilities:

1)  Gingrich is right to say that his marital problems are old news with voters, and the endorsements of his former rival and the 100 TEA Party figures push him over the top in SC.  As the new consensus TEA Party candidate, he goes on to challenge Romney with the solid backing of the more conservative wing of voters.

2)  Republican voters don't like people who screw around with their marriages, meaning that today's new allegations sink Gingrich.  Herman Cain shakes his head in sad sympathy as Gingrich is destroyed by the allegations.

   (As to which:  Why is the headline that he asked for "an open marriage"?  The arrangement is hardly unheard of, especially among the rich and powerful; surely if he had honestly approached his wife with his feelings, and accepted her firm "no," we would take this as a minor sin -- or, these days, even just a quirk -- brought on by a robust nature.  The problems facing Gingrich are that he got around to asking only after he'd already begun enjoying an 'open marriage'; and that, rather than accepting "no," he divorced his second wife for his third.)

There are three sub-cases:

2a)  Gingrich's fall, just as conservative sentiment had lined up behind him, collapses conservative morale and allows Romney to walk to the nomination.

2b) Gingrich's falling numbers causes him to bow out of the race, endorsing Romney as a way to salvage what he can for his political future with the Republican establishment.  While many of his supporters will never accept Romney, enough follow his lead to end the nomination contest.

2c)  Conservatives swap their allegiance to the last non-Romney in the race, Rick Santorum, who was just announced to have actually won Iowa after all.  Only three states having voted so far, there remains a real race for the nomination.

So, the first breaking point is whether we get scenario (1) or one of the sub-cases of (2).  We'll know that pretty soon.  If it's (1), Santorum -- who seems the best of the remaining candidates to me -- probably has no chance of success.  If it's (2), and Gingrich endorses Romney, Santorum also probably cannot overcome the combined weight at this point.  If it's (2) and Gingrich does not endorse Romney, we'll see Romney win anyway unless there is a quick and decisive shift to Santorum.  Even then, he'll be under significant disadvantages of money and establishment support; but perhaps he can make a fight of it there.

Sadly, none of that is in Santorum's hands -- as they say in the NFL, at this point he does not control his own fate.

Troll Valley

I have just finished reading Lars Walker's Troll Valley, which is available for the Kindle and for the Nook readers.  Since we have the benefit of Mr. Walker's company, I really ought just to suggest that you read it, in the hope that we might have the pleasure of all discussing it together.

The book treats the integration of myth into modern life:   both the pagan mythos of Norway and Norwegian immigrants, and Christian myth.  That this is meant to be of contemporary interest is demonstrated by the "present day" characters who frame the book, but the action takes place mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the story, a child with a fairy godmother grows up to lose sight of her, and the myths that guided his childhood.  In the process he becomes a vile and unpleasant man, under the guidance of a mother who becomes ever more domineering and destructive to her own family.  The mother, actually, is one of the most interesting characters.  She embraces the prohibition movement allegedly out of a desire to "do good," but over time we see that her real interest is in control.  She uses prohibition to force her husband's father into submission within his own house; then, she moves into new fields of progressive thought -- eugenics, vegetarianism, and the lot -- to force the old man out of the house entirely.  Finding sparks of resistance remaining in her eldest son and husband, she cranks up the embrace of these intolerant philosophies until she has driven everyone out, and can bask in her role as a woman who has sacrificed everything for Prohibition and Temperance.

There is a wider lesson to her example.  A family home is like a broader human community in that it has rules that establish a way of life, and under that way of life a community is possible.  We see in the early chapters how the traditions of Norwegian families at Yuletide sustained a broad community through hard work.  It is at that feast that the mother first uses her power to force a change in the rules, in her interest and against the interests of others.  It is by forcing continual alterations of the rules of life that she destroys the community within the house, so that finally no one can live with her at all.

Each of these rules is meant to represent moral progress, but each of them destroys the living community in which human kindness is possible.  The living spirit of the community is broken by the rules themselves, and in the climax of the book -- when the mother tries to wield her church group to destroy a young woman who dared to taste beer and dance at a wedding -- we find the broader lesson.  That part, though, you must read for yourself.

I will say no more at this time, but if you are interested, I would be happy for us to reconvene to discuss it once everyone who wishes to join the discussion has had the time to read it.  If you would like to join in, let me know in the comments and we'll arrange a time:  hopefully Mr. Walker will be so kind as to join in our discussion as well.

What's Killing Manufacturing?

Via D29, an answer that may surprise:

“Wages?” I ask. 

His dark eyebrows arch as if I were clueless, then he explains the reality of running a fab -- an electronics fabrication factory. “Wages have nothing to do with it. The total wage burden in a fab is 10 percent. When I move a fab to Asia, I might lose 10 percent of my product just in theft.” 

I’m startled. “So what is it?” 

“Everything else. Taxes, infrastructure, workforce training, permits, health care."
...
Take tax policy. Historically, manufacturing was the high-wage sector of the economy -- manufacturing jobs still pay about 30 percent more than service jobs in education and health care -- so tax policy milked it. Manufacturing companies, in the old days, actually paid the corporate income taxes that many others avoided. Commodity producers (oil, timber, agribusiness) lobbied for, and received, federal subsidies, with investors in oil and gas wells simply voiding corporate income taxes on the profits they earned. Banking, retail and services found their own ways around taxes, often by offshoring intellectual property or shifting profit to tax havens. Eventually, manufacturers figured out how to duck taxes as well -- by going overseas. 

Yet it isn’t just taxes. Wind turbines, for example, are enormous, heavy and expensive to transport -- so there is a big advantage to fabricating them close to the installation point. But consider the predicament of the Spanish wind manufacturer Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA after it began operations in Pennsylvania. Because the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Transportation wouldn’t establish uniform standards for transporting the enormous turbine blades, each state followed its own rules. Whenever a blade crossed a state line it had to be unloaded by a construction crane and then reloaded to conform to the next state’s specifications.

Against SOPA

The blackout is in support of the anti-SOPA movement.



An article describes the issue:

For example if you post a link to the story on your Facebook wall. Under SOPA, all of Facebook can be blocked. To avoid this fate, Facebook would be responsible for policing the copyright status of every piece of content its users post. The same happens with search engines, which to avoid being shut down, Google and Bing would be responsible for policing the copyright ownership of every piece of content they index.

That includes Blogger too, of course:  we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of this, simply because some other blog on Blogger posted something that was copywritten.  How likely is that?  I'd have to say the probability approaches certainty.

A Poet Looks at Africa

Eliza Griswold reports from the edge of Europe, an island in the Mediterranean called Lampedusa.  It's an interesting piece, if only stylistically -- being a poet rather than a journalist, Ms. Griswold thinks nothing of devoting an entire paragraph to the question, "What am I doing here?"  That liberty is a strength.

The name Misericordia is familiar. I realize I heard it last week when I was with fellow Civitella artists touring the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro. There, in the famous Piero della Francesca triptych, a hooded man kneels at the base of the cross. He looks like a hangman, but in fact he’s a member of this group, Misericordia. While they were doing charity work among the sick and dying, they wore black masks to protect against disease, and to protect their identity so they couldn’t be thanked. I imagine Luciforo in his yellow hazmat suit and a hood. 

“Luciforo, what have you seen that you can’t forget?” I ask. 

“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea. They popped up like corks,” he says.

The Romney Oppo Book

By coincidence, it appears that the McCain campaign's oppo book on Romney has been released to the web.  Given our ongoing discussion, it might serve as a useful source of information.  While it is, of course, an opposition book -- and therefore designed to be harmful rather than sympathetic -- a good oppo book must be tight enough that the candidate relying on it won't look foolish.

One for the Gibbet

It is possible to ask questions about the recent shipwreck, and we may choose to draw wider lessons or to resist that temptation.  One narrow lesson, though, is clear enough:  the captain should hang.

The chaos and the deaths, whatever else they are, represent a failure of leadership.  They are the direct result of an officer abandoning his post just at the moment when his post was most necessary.  If we would have the order we desire in these emergencies, we must enforce discipline on those charged with maintaining that order. The old standard that a captain goes down with his ship had a purpose; but even if we no longer wish to maintain that standard, the captain surely should not be the first man off of the ship, nor should we suffer him to refuse to return to his post.

Chesterton had King Alfred speak of these things to the people who came to him, asking that the king help them restore the order of the world.  Alfred replied in a metaphor, using the plucking of the White Horse to explain how all civilization depends on constantly renewing and reinforcing the old order.

  "And though skies alter and empires melt,

          This word shall still be true:

          If we would have the horse of old,

          Scour ye the horse anew.

          "One time I followed a dancing star

          That seemed to sing and nod,

          And ring upon earth all evil's knell;

          But now I wot if ye scour not well

          Red rust shall grow on God's great bell

          And grass in the streets of God."

Of Wrath and Goodness

It is the wise man who knows that the answer to a contemporary puzzle is often best sought in the ancients.

In the Western heroic tradition, the paragon of the humane warrior is Homer's Hector, prince of the Trojans. He is a fierce fighter: On one particular day, no Greek can stand up to him; his valor puts the whole Greek army to rout. Even on an unexceptional day, Hector can stand up to Ajax, the Greek giant, and trade blow for blow with him. Yet as fierce as Hector can be, he is also humane. He is a loving son to his aged parents, a husband who talks on equal terms with his wife, Andromache, and a tender-hearted father. He and King Priam are the only ones in Troy who treat Helen, the ostensible cause of the war, with kindness. 

One of the most memorable scenes in The Iliad comes when Hector, fresh from the battlefield, strides toward his boy, Astyanax. The child screams with fright at the ferocious form encased in armor, covered with dust and gore. Hector understands his child in an instant and takes off his helmet, with its giant horsehair plume, then bends over, picks his boy up and dandles him, while Andromache looks on happily. Astyanax—who will soon be pitched off the battlements of Troy when the Greeks conquer the city—looks up at his father and laughs in delight. 

The scene concentrates what is most appealing about Hector—and about a certain kind of athlete and warrior. Hector can turn it off. He can stop being the manslayer that he needs to be out on the windy plains of Troy and become a humane husband and father. 

To say that it is appealing does not go far enough:  it is necessary, and it is the hardest thing in the world.  The reason to praise Hector is not just that he got it right, but that getting it right is so very difficult to do.

Reductionism

Theodore Dalrymple writes of Belgium, in a way that sounds very familiar:

As I write, Belgium has not had a central government for more than 500 days. While I must admit, as an occasional visitor to that country, that the difference between Belgium with and Belgium without a central government is not apparent on casual inspection, this interregnum may take the theory of limited government too far. 

The reason that Belgium has lacked a government for so long is that the country is divided into two populations (actually three, but the third is too small to count) with incompatible politics: French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders. Belgium is officially bilingual, yet you see not a word of Dutch in Wallonia and not a word of French in Flanders. The division could not be starker if barbed wire separated the two provinces. Only in the capital, Brussels, does one find any concession to bilingualism. 

Historical and economic factors deepen the division between the two regions. Wallonia, though it contained a minority of Belgium’s population, long dominated its culture and economy. Even the Flemish upper class spoke French at home, while Dutch was the language of the peasantry; until recently, Belgian schools forbade children from speaking Dutch in class. With the decline of Wallonia’s coal and steel industries and the economic rise of Flanders, however, the pattern of dominance changed. Flanders went from being the poor relation to being the rich one, albeit with something of an inferiority complex. In the process, it started to make large transfer payments to Wallonia, which suffered from comparatively high unemployment. Such payments rarely promote goodwill between groups. Resentment is common among both the donors, who harbor suspicions that the recipients are exploiting them, and the recipients, who indulge in mental contortions to explain their dependency away. 

It is no surprise, therefore, that the largest political parties in Flanders are either nationalist or free-market; both philosophies lead to reducing or stopping the transfer payments. It is equally unsurprising that the largest political party in Wallonia is socialist and wants the payments to continue or increase. The Wallonian socialist party’s patronage powers in its territory are almost feudal in nature and extent; the last thing that the party of social change wants is actual change. 

If not quite deterministic, Dalrymple's description is reductionist:  the difference between free-marketeers and socialists boils down mostly to which side of transfer payments they find themselves.  The principles follow the economics as nicely, on this example, as they ever did in Marx's theory.

I take us all to be a bunch of free-marketeers and nationalists; I assume that most of us are also not receiving any transfer payments from the government.  Are we in the same boat as the people of Flanders -- thinking ourselves principled, but really driven by rice-bowl issues?  Are our opponents in the same boat as the people of Wallonia, having concocted an idea of "fairness" and "justice" that is really limited to a desire to be paid out of someone else's wallet?

Both sides have elaborate arguments to the contrary.  Dalrymple's suggestion is that these arguments are not rational, but rationalizations.  What do you think?

The Fat Man

Since I spend most of my time with ancient and medieval writings, I'm sometimes a little surprised when I run across what contemporary thinkers take to be an interesting puzzle. From the Stanford Law Review, "The Fat Man":

Consider one of the most famous hypotheticals on the subject of self-defense: the Fat Man puzzle. In Fat Man, you find yourself in a small boat at the bottom of a chasm. Although there are many versions, what they have in common is that an enormously fat individual is hurtling down from the cliff. You have no idea why he is falling—whether, say, he jumped or was pushed. All you know for sure is that if he hits you, you die. You have no space to maneuver, and no time to escape. Fortunately, you are armed with your trusty Fat Man gun. You can pull the trigger and vaporize him, thereby saving yourself. 

Theorists of self-defense usually posit that killing another to protect the self must be based either on the status of the attacker (e.g., enemy soldier in war) or what the attacker is doing (e.g., actively shooting at you). The Fat Man problem usefully divorces the justification for violent self-defense from the motive of the assailant. Robert Nozick’s original version of the problem stipulated that Fat Man has been pushed, and is therefore morally innocent; thus theories of self-defense that depend on what the attacker is doing (e.g., is he engaged in aggression?) cannot justify the use of the vaporizer.* 

And yet the Fat Man problem is in other ways too easy. Augustine, to take an example, would surely have rejected the use of the vaporizer gun, on the ground that your life is not intrinsically more valuable than the Fat Man’s. Liberalism’s refusal to weigh lives against each other also makes calculation difficult. Yet I find that my students have little difficulty with the problem, answering as Nozick intended: they are by and large perfectly willing to blow Fat Man to smithereens to save themselves.

This situation is exactly identical to a non-theoretical problem that we've discussed here just recently:  the case of abortion where a zygote is wrongly implanted in the mother.  Without needing the machinery of a "Fat Man Gun," we can see that the moral issues are fairly straightforward:

1)  Party X is going to be killed by Party Y unless Party Y is killed first.

2)  Party Y is doomed anyway.

This case brings out two issues that are important to ideas about the use of force.  The first is that innocence is sometimes not a purely moral issue:  sometimes innocence is practical.  The baby is surely morally innocent, but practically the baby (or the Fat Man) is going to kill someone.  Thus, we can consider using force against a kind of target that normally would be exempt from consideration.

The second is one that any ancient thinker would have understood:  doom changes moral calculus.  We don't have a case here where we can save Party Y.  We are either allowing them to die, or killing them ourselves.  The outcome for them is not different.  Thus, we do our moral work on the issues that we can affect.

Taking action against such a target is a tragedy, but it may also be a duty.


*  The footnote here says that "theories that rest on moral culpability would not justify shooting down an airliner carrying 100 innocent passengers and 3 hijackers, when the hijackers intend to fly into a building, killing everyone on board, and hundreds or thousands more on the ground. This is not to say that shooting the airline down cannot be justified; the calculus relies on a combination of consequentialist body-counting and double effect."  But this is not correct:  there is no need for a "combination" of this sort, because one of the components of the medieval doctrine of double effect is proportionality.  Modern consequentialist thinking does not need to be added to make sense of the calculus; St. Thomas Aquinas established standards for dealing with that aspect of the question.

One of Those Ideas...

So there's this woman in New Zealand who decided to answer her bills by auctioning off part of her backside:

Bids on a cheeky online auction, giving the winner the chance to tattoo an image of their choice on a Lower Hutt woman's buttock, have topped the $10,000 reserve price with a week still to run. Tina Beznec is selling a 9cm by 9cm space of skin on her Trade Me auction "YOUR tattoo on my Bum!!" after being made redundant twice in the past year....

Ms Beznec suggests the canvas is the perfect place for a marriage proposal, business promotion, or an artist wanting to share a design. 

She is promising the winner's idea - no matter how outrageous - will end up on her rear.

'Well, that's just a terrible idea,' you may be saying, 'but the world is full of quirky individuals, and one such example is no reason to..."

Breaking Headline:  Backside Tattoo Auction Sparks Copycat Craze!

Some ideas the world would have been better off without.

Wicked, Wicked Woman

Cassandra has apparently decided to begin posting again, in spite of her many previous threats to be done with it forever.  You'd have thought she might have mentioned it to us!

150 Conservative and Evangelical Leaders Endorse Santorum

This has to be very encouraging for the Santorum campaign, and also for any of us whose hope for 2012 lies in consolidating conservative opinion behind a single candidate.  While not an "evangelical" myself, and not much given to joining organizations of any kind if I can help it, it's good from my perspective if it helps move people in  one direction.

Mr. Santorum hadn't seemed to me to be one of the serious candidates until Iowa, but I wonder to what degree that judgment was improper.  It was made based on the fact that no one seemed to take him seriously, plus his infamous Google problem.  The latter, though, was a work of viciousness by a character of low morals who ought not to be granted a veto over anything.  The former is an unfortunate necessity of democratic politics, because no matter how good your candidate is, he can't win if no one will vote for him.  (Not that this usually stops me; I can't recall the last time I voted for someone who won a primary election.)

So, Santorum?  He gave a good speech at the Iowa convention, and since I have been paying attention, I like what I see of him.  I won't go as far as Mr. David Brooks in endorsing his vision, but I do agree that we need to think about a system that looks out for the interest of those Americans who play by the rules and work hard. Santorum clearly believes in such a system, though it is worth noting that he rejected Gingrich's bashing of Bain capital, and truly groups like Bain are a necessity in a free market economy.  Gov. Perry wasn't wrong to call them "vulture capitalists," though -- the positive contribution they make is very similar to the work that vultures do for the world.  Any man who spends enough time in the wild comes to like vultures.



I think I could vote for Santorum, all things considered.  We have to choose from what is on the table.  Of those options, this may be the best.

Dueling Chanters

The concept is Appalachian, but the execution is Irish enough.

Humans in Big Gatherings

Interesting infographic.

Another Take on Abortion

With h/t to Power Line, this image makes one aspect of the question pretty clear. Regardless of where one falls on the abortion question, the grandparents have a large, if not decisive role.

Eric Hines