A Surplus in Five Years

The senators most aligned with the TEA Party have produced legislation designed not merely to balance the budget, but to create a surplus within five years.  Such a plan might begin to address the severe budgetary issues threatening the nation:  the unfunded promises in Federal pensions, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that will consume the budget.  We must do this sooner and faster, rather than later and more slowly.

The Hill describes the plan -- eventually, after seven paragraphs of explaining that it is a "wish list" that can "never pass" and providing talking points about it.  Here are the details.

The lawmakers said they would turn Medicare into a premium support plan that would give seniors the same healthcare plan as members of Congress. They say this would save an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years....  

The trio would curb Social Security spending by increasing the retirement age over time and indexing benefits to individual incomes. High-income earners would see slower growth in their benefits while low-income workers would see increased benefits.   

The proposal would fund Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps and child nutrition programs through block grants.  It would cut most discretionary spending to fiscal year 2008 levels but spare national defense spending from the deep cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act.  It would freeze foreign aid spending at $5 billion a year and eliminate the departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development and Energy and privatize the Transportation Security Administration.   

The plan would repeal the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

All of that sounds like a good start.  It's a nice touch that they don't "eliminate" foreign aid, as it is one of our cheaper but more effective foreign policy tools.  It's an easy cut that demagogues often suggest to Americans, but we get a lot of mileage out of USAID in places like the southern Philippines.

Pagans MC and the 2nd Amendment

Volokh comments on an interesting case that shows something of the limits of our legal approach to the world.  American laws are based on a model drawn up by businessmen and lawyers, who have a certain way of approaching the world in which business-style arrangements are assumed to be good models for thinking about other social arrangements.  Thus, we have John Locke's concept of a "social contract," which substitutes a business model for the actual facts about how political bonds are formed and maintained; and we have the modern concept of marriage as a sort-of contract rather than a kinship bond, the limits of which we've discussed at length here.

Another limitation is demonstrated by the current case.  The President of a chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club (PMC) is a convicted felon who is, therefore, denied exercise of second amendment rights.  Now, he lives in a violent world in which he might come into conflict with the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC), which has been trying to push the PMC out of some of its traditional territory, and so he feels (with some justice!) that he needs protection.

Many men in a situation where the law was putting their lives at risk -- and not merely outlaw bikers! -- would simply have thumbed their noses at the law and done what they felt they had to do.  Our chapter President, however, actually obeyed the law in spite of his felonious past:  he just asked that members of his club who were able to obtain lawful concealed weapons permits do so, and then carry firearms when with him on club business in order to protect him.

The court has held that those club members who did this -- who, remember, were able to pass the criminal background checks required for them to obtain legitimate concealed weapon permits -- broke Federal law.  The reason the court believes this is true is that it accepts the government's argument that the club members were "employed" by the chapter President.  The club members appealed the conviction on the grounds that, actually, they weren't employed by the President at all:  he didn't pay them, for one thing; there was no contract; there were no benefits; and they certainly didn't conceive of it as an employer-employee relationship.  This is because it wasn't an employer-employee relationship!  They weren't his employees, but members of a club.

I frankly think that PMC is in the right here, and the government in the wrong.  The government wants to act on the presumption that PMC is an organized criminal group, but it hasn't proven that.  The government's argument is that 'employed' is a word with several senses, and one of those senses is 'used for a purpose'; but, while that is in some sense true, it's nonsense as an argument in this case.  It's clear that isn't what the statute controls.  It controls employment relationships.

The reason this law doesn't prevent what the government would like to prevent here is that the law was written by people who brought these contract-type assumptions to the problem.  PMC and HAMC and the others are not like corporations (even if, as sometimes happens, they incorporate in order to register trademarks and such).  Their fundamental ethic is not capitalist.  They don't live in the same world as the lawyers and businessmen who wrote the law.  A law built around contracts, employers and employees, and so forth, is naturally irrelevant to what these motorcycle clubs are doing.

What you are dealing with in PMC is the Jomsvikings.  They are a warrior brotherhood bound by a code that separates them from the rest of American society, and which is enforced outside the law by systems of honor backed by violence and threats of violence.

The existence of such an order within American society may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how it is used and for what purpose.  My reading on these kinds of clubs is that they are usually a mixture of good and bad.  The old war-band ethic has a lot to recommend it, and some men may find it to be the order that lets them structure a life worth living.

You can see a lot of the mixture of good and bad in this old documentary.  (There are nine parts; watch for Jerry Garcia playing a HAMC wedding, which is conducted on terms that are surely unenforcable in any court -- a fact that might give the lie to the idea that marriage is a contract, since if it were, you could enter into a contract on such terms.)  However you shake out on the idea of good and bad, though, what should be clear to everyone is this:  what they are doing has nothing to do with laws based on contracts and employment.  They're doing something very different from any of that.

The Afghan Ulema Council Ruling on Women

Ms. Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan Member of Parliament who survived a Taliban attempt on her life, worries that a recent ruling by the Afghan Ulema Council represents an outreach by Karzai to the Taliban.

"They have started taking some of those basic rights," she said, "like working together, living together, going out like a free human being. I am worried for my daughters and for all the girls and women of Afghanistan."

It's certainly right to be worried.  A rush transcript of the ruling can be read here; it dwells chiefly on the rights of women in Islam until section "F," when we hear about the other side of the coin.

F.   Women cannot be inherited. Similarly, there are many other rights, granted to a woman under the religion of Islam, which are observed. But, where a Muslim woman has many rights, [she also] has duties and obligations, such as:

* Adherence, in faith and action, to the orders and prohibitions of Islam’s sacred Shariah
* Complete adherence and observance of the hijab [according to the Shariah], which protects the dignity and personality of the woman
* Avoiding mingling with stranger men in various social situations, such as education, shopping, the office and other affairs of life
* In consideration of the clarity of verses 1 and 34 of Surah an-Nisa’ [of the Qur’an], men are fundamental and women are secondary; also, lineage is derived from the man. Therefore, the use of words and expressions that contradict the sacred verses must be strictly avoided.
* Respecting [the orders] about the multiplicity of wives (polygamy), which are in accordance with clear orders of the Qur’an
* Avoiding travel without a [Shariah-sanctioned] mahram (male companion)
* Adherence to the clear orders of Muhammad’s Shariah in case of divorce

The authors helpfully cite the source of their claim that women are secondary:  verses 1 and 34 of the Surah an-Nisa' (i.e., "The Women").  As we all know by now, the Koran is supposed to be the actual word of God, filtered only by Muhammad and the angel, allegedly Gabriel, who revealed it to him.

1. O mankind! Be dutiful to your Lord, Who created you from a single person (Adam), and from him (Adam) He created his wife [Hawwa (Eve)], and from them both He created many men and women and fear Allah through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and (do not cut the relations of) the wombs (kinship) . Surely, Allah is Ever an All-Watcher over you.... 

34. Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other, and because they spend (to support them) from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient (to Allah and to their husbands), and guard in the husband's absence what Allah orders them to guard (e.g. their chastity, their husband's property, etc.). As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful), but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance). Surely, Allah is Ever Most High, Most Great.

You may also find verse 11 to be telling, since it deals with inheritance rights between sons and daughters; though, remember that the English tradition was primogeniture; this system, though unequal, does provide a better inheritance (and therefore, property) system for the daughters than that.

The BBC notes that this ruling has the potential to reverse the legal freedoms instituted for women in Afghanistan a decade ago, following the American invasion.

I gather that the American people will not endure a presence in Afghanistan of the length that we devoted to, say, Japan or South Korea.  That being so, it will fall on women like Fawzia Koofi to prove these freedoms are rights.  Perhaps there are ways we can be of some service, even once we can no longer hold back the tide.

Americans had better steel themselves to swallow this, though, if we do choose to walk away.  You're going to have a chance to reconsider just what is meant by the word "rights."  Those things, taken for granted, are like wine:  they are a gift from God, in the sense that the possibility of wine -- like the possibility of freedom -- is inherent in the structure of the world.  Yet if the good is to be had it must be made by human hands, and made new every year.  If we do not do the work, there will be no wine.

But wine, I have heard, is also banned by the Koran.

Sic Transit Lex

By now you will have heard that one of the most famous, and most justly famous, of the milbloggers died when his fighter crashed yesterday.  The man we called Neptunus Lex was a good companion (especially, one might be inclined to say under happier circumstances, for a fighter pilot).  He was also a good writer:  his thoughts were clear and his expression courtly.

You can leave condolences at his place.  I am going to follow the example at BLACKFIVE and close the comments here, because it's best that they be made where his family can see them.

He had a mechanical problem with his plane just a few days ago.  You may remember reading about it.

It’s funny how quickly you can go from “comfort zone” to “wrestling snakes” in this business. 

But even snake wrestling beats life in the cube, for me at least. In measured doses.

Spoken like a man.  He certainly was one.

Some Go Back

My father was a long-time Captain of the local Volunteer Fire Department.  Thus I know, and have had it impressed upon me since I was quite young, that no one should ever go back into a burning building.  The people who go back in to rescue others, having made it out themselves, almost never survive.

For some things, though, I'd go back too.

Firefighters recovered the body of Chief Warrant Officer Edward Cantrell on the second floor of his North Carolina home, not far from the remains of 6-year-old Isabella and 4-year-old Natalia.

I'm sorry, Chief.  You did all you could.  Angels can do no more.

"The Premium for a Burning House Is the Price of the House"

Megan McArdle, whose columns and comment boards I so enjoy, is taking a sabbatical to work on a large project. She arranged for a handful of colleagues to cover for her; one posted today on the subject of the American healthcare system. It's a decent post, but my favorite part was a link to a couple of old articles, two of the best summaries I've found of the dumb things we do to ourselves under the name of the health insurance system. One is brief while the other is rather long, but very well worth reading from start to finish. Both make the essential distinction between insurance and prepaid medical care.

Election Day

It's election day in Georgia, and I just went and cast the shortest ballot I ever did:  there was exactly one question before the electorate today.  Although it's an important question, it's not very significant that you get out and vote today:  Nate Silver estimates that my preferred candidate has a zero-percent chance of winning (running third behind Mr. Romney, whom Silver estimates to have a one-percent chance).  My opinions line up about as well as usual with that of the democratic majority, even in Georgia.

Still, delegates are divided proportionately, so it's not a complete waste of a trip; and more, there's something to be said for participating in its own right.

Much has been said about the damage done by an extended primary, but there is a real virtue in counting the votes.  The longest primary I can recall was the 2008 fight between then-Senators Clinton and Obama, which was also said to be crippling to both; but in fact, there was a landslide victory for their party in the fall.  It's a good thing if people listen to the debates, read and think, and then have a chance to vote and know that their vote counts.

The Democratic Party fell down on that last point in 2008, resolving contentious issues of vote counting by having Sen. Clinton accede to a nomination of her opponent by general acclamation.  She was a loyal soldier in that, as probably Mr. Santorum will be also should he lose:  after all, he was once the Republican Party's whip.

The idea of democratic legitimacy may not survive, but it is an ideal I have fought for and continue to defend.  This is not because it means that my side wins, because -- insofar as I have a "side" at all, there being so very few people who believe as I do -- there are far too few people like me to prevail even in the smallest and most local contest.

No, it is because my father told me as a boy about people who would stand in line to vote even though guerrillas would come and fire into the line.  It is because, in Iraq, we defended people who stood in line even though mortars would fall and suicide bombers would threaten.  It is because in Afghanistan we have killed men who would themselves kill to prevent women from voting, and because those women may not be able to vote for much longer.

Democracy may not be the right way to choose a government or a policy, but democracy is our cause whether it's right or wrong.  That may not be a good argument, but sometimes honor demands that we do things that wiser people wouldn't do.

On White Bread

The surprise here is how interesting the subject turns out to be:

In 1890, 90 percent of the country's bread was baked in homes. The rest was purchased from tiny neighborhood bakeries. By 1930, this trend had reversed completely: 90 percent of bread was purchased, and purchased from increasingly large, increasingly distant factories....

Legions of food reformers, social workers, public-health officials, advertising executives, and an astonishing number of diet gurus worked frantically to convince Americans that choosing the wrong bread would lead to serious problems. Some pinpointed newfangled loaves as the source of cancer, diabetes, criminal delinquency, tuberculosis, kidney failure, overstimulated nervous systems, and even "white race suicide." Others heralded modern bread as a savior, delivering the nation from drudgery, hunger, and dangerous contagions carried by unscientific bread. But they could all agree on one thing: Incorrect food choices were the root cause of nearly all of the nation's moral, physical, and social problems....

Even that sentimental icon of all that is good—"Mother's bread"—was denounced under the banner of a safe and efficient diet. Scientific American, women's magazines, and home-economics textbooks portrayed careless home baking as a threat to family health, while other observers wondered whether even the most careful housewife should bake at all. 

This is one of those things I've always wondered about, albeit only vaguely:  how did we as a nation come to give up something as wonderful as fresh bread?  It's not hard to make, and a local bakery isn't a huge extravagance.  Many other nations have managed to continue having locally-baked, fresh bread available even as they've modernized their economies.

Now I know.  There's something about these little panics by mass media that we should begin to recognize:  they always makes things worse.  Except, of course, for Big Bread, which came out gloriously well from the exercise.

It's Hard To Write A Love Song To Yourself...

...but apparently that's the wave of the future.



The movie will apparently be called "Brave," but at this point, it might better be called "Hackneyed."  How many movies of this type have there been over the last twenty years?  It's gone on so long that it would be brave to make a movie that told a traditional fairy tale.

The difference between a traditional fairy tale and this kind goes beyond the obvious -- the female hero who can outfight all the boys with ease, which is now the standard rather than the transgressive model.  Rather, the real difference is masked by that aspect:  you couldn't make this movie with a male hero, because people would be outraged to see young women portrayed as a pack of useless losers.  People would hate the male hero whose attitude conveyed that it was an insult to his excellence to suggest he might marry some penny-ante girl from his village.  The female lead allows them to tell the story they want to tell without running up against the uncomfortable truth about what kind of a story it is they are telling.

The real difference is that the love story has been replaced, in our age, by the story of the 'hero' in love with herself.  Prince Charming, whatever his flaws, was driven by love for another:  his service, and his sacrifice, were for a beloved lady he valued above his own life and for whom he would suffer any pain and dare any peril.  The modern 'hero' is focused on her own fulfillment, resisting every duty to her family or her society as an injustice that interferes with her personal journey of self-actualization.

I can't wait for the "Princess Bride" remake:  you know, the one where Buttercup escapes by knocking the giant out with a rock, swims out to the waiting pirate ship and takes command as the Dread Pirate Roberta, calling back to shore as Wesley is led away to his doom:  "You didn't think I'd waste my life on a farm boy?"

Well, no.  Of course not.  True love doesn't happen every day.

Sorry Folks, Nothing We Can Do

Our friends at Samizdata continue to chronicle the disaster that is the modern state from a British perspective.

[A man] drowned in a shallow boating pond in his local park, after suffering an epileptic seizure while feeding swans. A passer-by (a woman who was in charge of a small child so did not dare enter the pond) called the emergency services. But the first firemen to show up announced that they only had Level One training, for ankle-deep water, and needed to wait for a specialist team with Level Two training for chest-deep water.

Remember when "Anarchy in the UK" sounded like a threat rather than a suggestion for improvement?

On Making Things Right

In a post aimed at the late Andrew Breitbart -- of whom I know fairly little -- The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates cites the history of SNCC.  This was short for the "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee," a fact which makes the history a little ironic.

In the mid-1960s, SNCC, one of the most important civil rights groups of its era, began to split at the seams. Since its inception, the group had committed itself to the eradication of white supremacy strictly through the twin pillars of nonviolence and integration. SNCC members, like their fellow activists throughout the South, endured threats, beatings, bombings, and shootings, all of which they greeted with Bible verses and song. The tactic ultimately succeeded by cutting through centuries of hate and accessing a basic sense of human decency. 

But nonviolence exacted a price and, in 1966, its success was not assured. That was the year Stokely Carmichael assumed leadership of the organization. Carmichael had spent much of the early 60s subjecting his body to beatings, tear-gassings, and water-hoses. Committed to integration and nonviolence, he had driven down dark and lonely Southern roads accompanied only by the knowledge that people of his ilk were being vanished there with some unsettling regularity. When Carmichael came to power he, and much of SNCC's membership, had changed their politics. They expelled whites from the group and rejected nonviolence. Eventually there was a quasi-merger with the Black Panther Party and a full-throated embrace of revolutionary violence.  

Among the SNCC members to reject that path, were Shirley and Charles Sherrod.

Mr. Coates may be right in the point he intends to make, which is that Andrew Breitbart treated Shirely Sherrod worse than she deserved.  This history, however, passes by another point of greater personal concern to me.

One of those "expelled whites" was a high-school teacher of mine, one of the best teachers I ever had.  At the time that the "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee" became just the 'Student Committee,' he was cast out in spite of having served faithfully those ideals of "a basic sense of human decency" that eventually won out.

It's been a long time since I was in high school, but at the time -- as now, as always -- racial tensions remained somewhat high.  This teacher went so far as to offer a course on race and racism, from the perspective you would expect from a former member of SNCC.  It was a year-long course, but after a few weeks he was removed from instructing it by the demands of the black students, who were upset at the idea of a white man teaching on the subject of racism.  Political correctness, which was at the time a newly named phenomenon, repeated SNCC's injustice, lashing out at a good-hearted man who was only ever on their side.  These were teenagers who had inherited the success of the Civil Rights movement as a free gift, paid for by men like the one they scorned on account of his skin.

If we are going to speak of this history, we ought to remember that as well.

The First Day of Spring (Subjective)

Objectively, spring is still almost a month away.  Subjectively, it was eighty degrees and sunny today, and the pear trees have broken out in beautiful white blossoms.

What a fine day for a ride.

A couple of miles away, a neighbor's heraldic sign.

A Troll Valley-style house in Hartwell, Georgia.

A similar but nicer home -- sadly some of the details are obscured by the tree.  Note the Scottish Rampant Lion flying beneath Old Glory.

A fine day to wash your boots in the Savannah River.

Down by the riverside.

Currahee Mountain, on the return leg.

On 'The Ethicists'

Parents should be able to kill their newborns, argue a panel of ethicists in a new paper, because they are not actually people; they are only potentially people.  The core of the argument lies in the definitions:

“Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.  We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

The academic use of "her" to avoid sexism is unusually appropriate, since the majority of abortions are of female children.

The argument sounds at first blush like the kind of argument I would expect from an ethicist with proper training, because the potential/actual distinction was important to Aristotelian theories of generation.  This arises from the form/matter distinction, and from Aristotle's theory of motion and change.  In Physics 1, he argues that in order for change to be possible, you must have two contraries and a substratum to move between them.  Thus, for something to become hot, hot must exist; and so must not-hot; and then there must be a third thing that isn't as hot as it could be, but moves towards maximal hotness.  That which defines how hot it is possible to be is 'the actuality of hot.'

In the case of generation, form and matter are joined; but the child does not have the full actuality of Man or Woman.  Obviously, at birth, the child still retains substantial potential, and it advances toward that potential over the course of its growth.  Thus, if we define an actual person on Aristotle's terms, we could say that a child isn't an actual person until the child achieves its full growth both in frame and reason.

The ethicists, however, aren't doing anything as interesting or subtle as that; they are proposing a binary standard rather than a sliding scale of acutality,.  Presumably a two-year-old would be 'an actual person' under this standard.

There are several things that I might say about this.

1)  On the history of the idea:  Aristotle himself viewed infanticide as undesirable except when the child was deformed, or in cases when population pressure made it necessary (both more serious considerations in the ancient world, when scarcity of food was a far more severe and immediate concern).  He opposed abortion after the child had developed sensation, not reason.  (Politics VII 1335b20-30, but see also History of Animals VII Part 3, which proposes based on dissection that male but not female children will have organs such as eyes -- that is, the necessary conditions for sensation -- at forty days' gestation.)

Interestingly, the 40-day standard was being enforced by the Church in Charlemagne's day:  a woman who arranged the abortion of her child after it was forty days' old in the womb was subject to three years of penance, while a woman who did so earlier was subject only to a year's penance.  The secular law, however, treated anyone who assisted in an abortion (as for example by providing abortifacient drinks) as a homicide.  (See Pierre Riche, Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, page 50).

That was not the case throughout the Western world, however; some followed the Aristotelian view and some other views on infanticide and abortion -- generally, after the second century AD, alternative views were much harsher.

2)  On the proposed standard of the ethicists:  Indeed it may not be obvious that the child has substantially more or less moral standing ten minutes before birth or ten minutes after; no more than wine in a pitcher is substantially different ten minutes before being poured into a glass than it is ten minutes after (unless, of course, it has been drunk; in that case, it has achieved its most blessed state about that time).

Some objections:  before the umbilical cord is cut, the child is factually dependent on the mother for survival; afterwards, it is not.  It has the capacity (but not the actuality, to stay with that distinction) of being independent long before then; but if the actuality is what counts, it does not yet have it.  If independence is what counts, though, the child will still die without someone's care -- but it need not be the mother's, after that, so perhaps that is why she loses the right to dispose of the thing once it is born.

Alternatively, we might note that the experience of childbirth is a traumatic passage for everyone involved, not easily dismissed as meaningless.  It may be that the act of birth is something that is important to our society as a rite of passage:  and the child, having survived it, has thus passed into personhood ritually.  In that case, the ethicists are barking up the wrong tree:  the personhood of the child is nothing to do with the child, but with the rites of society.  That would be coherent with many human cultures, in which rites of passage are just so abrubt:  a child goes from a boy to a man in a day, or a week, or an instant, but the rite once complete is absolute.

3)  The question of value is interesting.  The child (according to them) does not itself value life; and so, if no one else values its life, its life is without value.  That is a remarkably capitalist position to take on human life.

4)  If we do want to return to a form/matter concept regarding the child, science has provided us with a genuine idea of what the form of a man or woman would be.  It is their DNA structure, which does exactly what Form in the ancient sense is supposed to do:  it organizes and structures the matter.  This is a living principle, which exists from fertilization and begins to work as soon as the zygote begins to divide.  Thus, we learn from scientific inquiry that there is not the movement in childhood from 'potentially Man' to 'actually Man.'  Rather, the Form of each individual is unique, and it is actually possessed by -- and only by -- the child from fertilization.

If possession of an actual human Form is what distinguishes an actual human being, then the child is actually human from the first moments of its life.

Bellavia for Congress

One of our own has apparently decided to hang it out in the wind.



His book on Fallujah is the best book I know of on that part of the Iraq War.  If you want to help him out, go here.

The Sacred

I've begun watching the early episodes of a show called "Breaking Bad," about a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque whose response to a life crisis is to start cooking meth with one of his ne'er-do-well ex-students. I thought it would be a nihilistic exploration of a disintegrating personality, but instead the script turns at every point on the central character's convincing moral choices under unbearable pressure. Not good moral choices, but believable ones, and demonstrated with economy in a fine script.

The main actor spends very little time explaining himself. His sidekick, the young student, is struggling harder to put into words what one human being owes to another. In one episode they face two tasks, one even more horrifying than the other. After quarreling for a bit over who should do which, the young man suggests a coin toss, which the teacher loses. The young man takes care of his own horrible job, only to find the older man procrastinating about his, which provokes the outraged outburst that "coin toss is sacred, man." When you expose yourself in good faith to the outcome of a tool of chance, you live with the result. You hang onto that moral precept even though you seem to have left the world of virtue far behind, and the coin toss is about profound crimes that are disintegrating your identity.

In some part of us, we know there have to be moral laws even if we ostensibly think the universe is a vast, materialist, meaningless void.

The Joust

Several of you have written to ask if I've seen the new "Full Metal Jousting" show on the History channel.  I hadn't, although I was aware of it; but now there is a full episode online if you want to watch it.  I hope the sport takes off, and I will be glad to watch it once it is a sport instead of a reality-TV show about people trying to start a sport.  Once it's more like PBR, I'll be glad to spend an evening with it.

By coincidence, I was doing some research yesterday and came across an article that says that re-enactment Medieval tournaments were very popular in the American South both before and after the Civil War.  The author began his career as a Marxist historian, but apparently his studies of Southern conservatism converted him.  In any case, it's an excellent article that shows how significant chivalric literature was to the education of Southerners in the 19th century; it's on EBSCOhost if you don't have JSTOR, and if you have neither, you can probably get it via your library.  Ask at the reference desk.

In any case, at the time the tournaments were roundly mocked by those outside the South.  Then as now, New York journalists were only too eager to explain how ridiculous it was not to be up with the latest progress.  Our historian relates:

John Houston Bills, a planter in western Tennessee, whiled away his spare hours early in 1866 by reading tales of the crusades, and in October he reported: "To day the great and long expected 'Tournament' comes off--1200 to 1500 persons attend it--the Tilting is Very spirited, a dozen or more Knights enter the Contest-Brewer of Holly Springs wins the prize, a fine horse--Betty Neely was crowned queen of Love & Beauty."

The editors of the Nation, then as now exemplars of New York provincialism and effrontery, exploded:

Any country in which it is the custom, in our day, to assemble in great crowds to watch men doing these things in broad daylight, dressed up in fantastic costumes, and calling themselves "disinherited knights," " knights of the sword," "knights of the lone star," and pretending to worship a young woman from a modest wooden house in the neighborhood as the "queen of love and beauty," and to regard the bestowal of a shabby theatrical coronet by her as the summit of earthly felicity, we need not have the least hesitation in pronouncing semi-civilized.

The editors of the Nation could not be contradicted. What, after all, could be more absurd[?]

Think of their bad taste in treating young ladies from modest wooden houses as if they were queens of love and beauty.

 Yes, think of that.

I Guess Madness Runs In The Family:

My sister writes to report that she just had a wonderful run up in Wyoming..  She's training for a marathon again, and the run was 15 miles.  She says that the usual pain she's been experiencing didn't appear, just some blisters she puts down to having been wearing these at the time.

Apparently the roads were icy because of an ongoing snowstorm.  I'd say something cutting about the quality of her judgment, but honestly, I have no standing to do so.  I haven't committed this particular offense against right reason, but I have certainly committed others at least as bad.

The Fields of Athenry

A Vice that Leans Toward Virtue

The man who does not know who his great-grandfather was, naturally enough would not care what he was. The Caskodens have pride of ancestry because they know both who and what. 

Even admitting that it is vanity at all, it is an impersonal sort of failing, which, like the excessive love of country, leans virtueward; for the man who fears to disgrace his ancestors is certainly less likely to disgrace himself.

Charles Major (under the pen name Edwin Caskoden) wrote these lines in the introduction to his novel set in the early years of Henry VIII.  I have a copy of his book -- first American edition! -- because not long ago I stopped my motorcycle by a ramshackle old Georgia building in Carlton, Georgia (once locally important as a farming town located on the railroad line, but now, population 233).  You can see a few pictures of the town here; the only building that remains in very good repair is the Post Office.

The antique store had a copy forgotten on a back shelf, for which they asked three dollars.  It is no surprise to find a book like this in Georgia, although it was too late to share the blame that Mark Twain put on Ivanhoe.

It's proving to be a very good book, with some memorable scenes and lines.  This one right at the introduction especially caught my interest.  It's an interesting concept:  a vice that leans toward virtue.  This particular vice is perhaps unique in that regard, because it is pride:  and pride has a conflicted history in the West.

This good sort of pride is really honor.  To honor is to give of yourself for something or someone worthy; honor is the quality of a man who does.  Thus the pride in one's ancestry is a form of respect for the worthy things they have done; and if you demonstrate your respect for them by trying to live so as not to disgrace them, you have become a man of honor yourself.

The vice of pride is something like vanity, and in this guise its history is far less noble.  To some degree the difference in emphasis is between the non-Christian and Christian elements that make up Western civilization, but not entirely.  There is a qualitative difference between these two expressions:  the one is a form of sacrifice, and the other a form of self-service.

You may enjoy the book, in any case.  It takes the trouble to flatter the reader by making the hero -- a young soldier of energy and skill -- a great lover of books, which is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.  It was just such a love of letters among an active and warlike people that made Ivanhoe such an influence in the South, and that doubtless brought this particular copy of the book to Georgia in its first available edition.

Irrationality

Today Mickey Kaus points to a book from 1978 that demonstrates what he calls an 'eerie prescience.'  The book's thesis is...

...that control of politics has passed out of the hands of the majority in part as a consequence of the development of a body he identifies as "the new elite", whose self identity is based not on ties to a specific community, but on a common reference to "scientific" measurement of intelectual capacity by grade scores and class achievements. This, he contends, drives an anti-majoritarian urge, which removes control from the hands of the electorate. The "new elites" do not accept the principle that all others are entitled to a valid and meaningful vote on issues which concern all of society.

Indeed.  So today, we have a ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a democratic majority.

The Court finds that neither Congress' claimed legislative justifications nor any of the proposed reasons proffered by BLAG constitute bases rationally related to any of the alleged governmental interests. Further, after concluding that neither the law nor the record can sustain any of the interests suggested, the Court, having tried on its own, cannot conceive of any additional interests that DOMA might further.... 

Prejudice, we are beginning to understand, rises not from malice or hostile animus alone. It may result as well from insensitivity caused by simple want of careful, rational reflection or from some instinctive mechanism to guard against people who appear to be different in some respects from ourselves.

This is not the first time we've talked about this claim that there is "no rational basis" for this definition of marriage.  I remain astonished by the claim, however, because this definition of marriage is backed by a huge amount of rational argument, with a history of hundreds of years.  Just last fall, we looked at Aquinas' arguments on whether matrimony arises from natural law.

Let's make two points about this.

1)  Note the list of citations in the series of sophisticated arguments offered.  The principle cited sources are Cicero and Aristotle, from works on ethics, rhetoric, and politics.  There is only one Catholic text cited, and it's offered as an example of an argument Aquinas rejects.  This underlines the point -- recently made to the German parliament -- that natural law theory is not a Christian but a secular philosophy, one that arises chiefly from the Stoics but also from Aristotle.

2)  Aquinas follows Aristotle and Boethius in defining humanity in terms of its rational nature.  "A person is an individual substance of rational nature."

My point here is not that Aquinas' definition is right, or impossible to argue against, or that you should personally adopt it.  It is that the claim that this definition is without a rational basis is indefensible.  It is simply impossible to sustain that argument.

How much easier, though, to assert it!  How much easier to declare that the problem is "a simple want of careful, rational reflection" -- and that of a tradition founded on Aristotle, Aquinas, Cicero, Boethius, and the Stoics!

"Poker Lessons from Richelieu"

Such is the title of this book review, which makes the case that the famous Cardinal was marked more by a gambler's sentiment than a manipulator's.  Since we were just talking about the Thirty Years War, here is a relevant section:

 In 1618, what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War broke out -- Europe’s last great spasm of religious warfare, in which a furious conflict between a series of Protestant states, on one side, and the House of Hapsburg and its Catholic allies, on the other, tore the center of the continent apart. France, a Catholic state itself, nevertheless intervened on the Protestant side, hoping to supplant the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs as the strongest power in Europe. 

Richelieu initially felt that France could do no more than subsidize Protestant efforts and engage in strictly limited military campaigns. Ironically, he feared treachery from the Huguenots, France’s own small Protestant minority, who had lingering grievances against the French state and control of several strategic towns, including the Atlantic port of La Rochelle. Realizing that he had to address the Huguenot threat before intervening seriously abroad, in 1627 Richelieu laid siege to La Rochelle and starved the city into submission. (By the end of the operation, even the rats had disappeared, and the starving locals were reduced to eating boiled shoe leather.)

La Rochelle has one of the more interesting civic histories.

Apparently We're Doing This Crusade Thing Now...

So I gather, anyway.  I had thought this was supposed to be a distraction from the economic issues, but it looks like we're all in.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Tuesday that President Barack Obama's administration has "fought against religion" and sought to substitute a "secular" agenda for one grounded in faith. 

Obama's campaign seized on the characterization, calling Romney's comments "disgraceful." 

Romney rarely ventures into social issues in his campaign speeches, but people participating in a town hall-style meeting one week before the Michigan primary asked how he would protect religious liberty.

I'm guessing this means this message tests well in focus groups -- not to speak ill of Mr. Romney, which I am done with, but rather as a compliment to his extraordinary message discipline and the professionalism of his campaign.  This is a better-formulated version of Mr. Santorum's remarks re: 'phony theology,' although in fairness, Mr. Romney wasn't speaking off the cuff.

Not that Mr. Santorum is backing off.

“Rick Santorum offered no apologies Tuesday for a controversial speech he gave in 2008 when he talked about the threat of Satan in America. 

“‘I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil,’ Santorum said in response to questions from CNN…

Well, if you're going to fight a Crusade, maybe the Crusader is the guy you want.

Either way, it's turning out to be a big deal.

Have a good Lent.  I'm giving up alcohol for the fast, which means that the beer I have in front of me could easily be the last beer I ever have -- after all, I ride a motorcycle everywhere.  It's a good one, though, a worthy end (if end it should prove to be).

Goodnight.

Carnival!

We've just finished our annual fire department fundraiser, with its Mardi Gras theme. We had a parade and everything, but I see from scouting out Mardi Gras and Carnival photos on the web that we're really going to have to up our game. As much time and trouble as we put into our festival, it was a pale, pale effort. It makes me want to start work right now on costumes and floats for next year. This is what I call exuberance.

Science and the Burning of Witches

I recently met a Franciscan nun who, after our conversation, gave me a book she thought that I ought to read.  It is called The Holy Longing, by a priest named Ronald Rolheiser.  Some of you may know it; I've only begun it, but already I suspect it is probably infamous among Catholic conservatives.

Aside from that judgment, I am not ready to weigh further on the book's quality; but he does make one claim that is quite wrong.  He is asking for a reconciliation of sorts between the old "paternalistic, Christian heritage" and the new world.  Along the way he defends the old faith with a historical reference:  "[A]s Rene Girard says it is not because we invented science that we stopped burning witches, but rather when, because of the Judeo-Christianity, we stopped burning witches that we invented science." (p. 39-40)

This is wrong as a point of history.  We invented science when we started burning witches.

The usual dates for the witch-burning craze are 1480-1750, around the time of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War.  It was about the time that there was this deep questioning of tradition -- that would lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modern science -- that there also coincidentally spread a new cultural distrust of the feminine.

I was just reading a collection of essays called Friendship in Medieval Europe that shows how much things changed.  Several of these essays note that -- contrary to what many people might expect if they were raised with the modern critique of Western history as "paternalistic" -- the early and High Middle Ages were a golden age for relations between the sexes. Of the Anglo-Saxon period, we learn:

"What we can conclude on a formal level, however, is that 'friendship' is not significantly limited, either in a hierarchical manner -- Boniface and Alcuin are friends with bishops as well as priests, abbots as well as monks -- or with regard to gender -- they are friends both with men and women. Every person (ominis homo -- and not: 'every male') needs a friend, as the Anglo-Saxon abbess Eangyth writes to St. Boniface; and she chooses him to be hers. Alcuin counts several women among his friends." (125)

It turns out that there are vast examples of robust friendships between men and women throughout the early and High middle ages, and into the late middle ages, including whole collections of letters now being studied by scholars across Europe. There is particular importance placed on the exchange of poetry between men and women as tokens of friendship; in the last few years, we've gained awareness of a huge amount of female-written Medieval poetry that is normally captured in letters between friends, including between monastic communities and nunneries. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote on the virtue of friendship, drawing on Aristotle's dictum that we can say to our friend, "You are the other half of my soul," (in Aristotle this is more usually translated 'the friend is our other self'); and the priest Richard Rolle, who died in 1349, wrote that in spite of the dangers of physical attraction between men and women, "that sort of friendship is not improper, but rewarding, if it is practiced with a good intention."

However, in 1401 the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, wrote a sermon in which he charged that friendship with women put you at risk of "diabolical deception" and 'great evil unless God in his goodness averts it.' Gerson nevertheless knew some women, including Christine de Pisan, whom he engaged with intellectually (and agreed with) in the famous debate of the morality of Roman de la Rose. Christine de Pisan, in the early 1400s, was challenging this new, rising misogyny and objected to the vulgar language that the book put into the mouths of noble women.  But when Gerson wrote his own book about it, he ignored her contributions and did not mention her at all. Gerson lived at the same time as Bernardino of Siena, whose traveling sermons popularized the idea of witches.

As for witch-burning in the early and High Middle Ages, it was actually banned by the Church under penalty of death. The same decree, in 785, banned belief in witches in order to suppress violence against women. That held until the 1400s, when popular pressure in Switzerland and Germany began to force the Church to rethink its stance. As late as the 1390s, though, women confessed to practicing 'white magic' to Inquisitors, but the Inquisitors had nothing in their guidelines about women using magic and had to write for advice.

It looks like the early 15th century is the turning point in which the Church (following popular movements from German-speaking central Europe) began to take the dark view of female sexuality that we have come to associate with witch-burnings.

The easy friendships between men and women that we observe in Chaucer, who lets the Wife of Bath have a merry wit and deliver a good long sermon on the virtues of women, did not quite die with him in 1400. Sir Thomas Malory, born in 1405, stands at the end of this golden age. He was in the English speaking world, which did not receive the witch-burning craze until after his death (England did not pass a law on witchcraft until 1542). Though it is commonplace to blame Malory for making Guinevere's sexuality the cause of the fall of Camelot, it is clear that Malory does not view Guinevere as a bad or wicked woman. In fact, one of the few times that Malory directly addresses his audience is to make the point that "she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end." Her love with Lancelot, though it had tragic practical consequences, is what redeems her for Malory, not what damns her.

Even the wicked sorceress Morgan le Fay is not a witch, but a student of necromancy -- see the article on the meaning of this in the Early and High Middle Ages, which is different from the word's meaning today. Of course, Morgan was a necromancer for Malory, but earlier she had been something else, not a witch but a fairy. In this guise she is the heroine of Marie de France's Lanval, saving the knight from an unfair judgment.

There is a doctrine that the Middle Ages were a dark and miserable time, and that the story of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment is a story of ever-marching progress toward a more rational society. In truth, the story is more complicated. The same breaking of the old order that allowed for a new scientific world view also let loose a great deal darker. It was not when we became scientific that we stopped burning witches. Rather, that was just when we began.

UPDATE:

History Ireland has a counterexample, the earliest witch-burning case I've heard of from 1324. It's worth reading their account in full. The only one who was burned was a minor figure, a servant of the family chiefly charged with heresy; and the secular law worked hard to defy the Church in the face of a very enthusiastic (and foreign) bishop. Of the principal defendants, the woman escaped by flight (she was extraordinarily wealthy), and her husband got off with a penance. The Church forced him to go on pilgrimage and to re-do a part of the local cathedral with lead. It turned out the lead was too heavy for the cathedral roof, which collapsed as a consequence of his fulfilling the penance the bishop had imposed. Divine judgment, possibly.

It's interesting to see how this early case played out, compared with the enthusiasm that would appear in later centuries.

Don't Be So Modest!

The AP says "Obama peddles modest American dream."

Don't be so modest, Mr. President!  I have learned just this morning about how you have improved the lives of millions of people.

As of January, the federal government was mailing out disability checks to more than 10.5 million individuals, including 2 million to spouses and children of disabled workers, at a cost of record $200 billion a year, recent research from JPMorgan Chase shows....

Mental-illness claims, in particular, are surging.

Well of course!  It's the easiest thing in the world to "prove" a mental illness exists; the DSM-IV is widely available and explains exactly how you should act when you go to the doctor.  For that matter, the Social Security office helpfully explains how you can satisfy their requirements.  For example, here is the criteria for establishing that you have a personality disorder.

Once you establish your disability, you are eligible for disability payments and may also be eligible for supplemental income payments.  After two years, you automatically gain membership in Medicare.  You can even work part time, or as a self-employed person, as long as you're careful not to overdo it.

As someone who has often been self-employed, I can easily imagine the benefits of getting cheap health care and a guaranteed income floor.  No wonder so many smart people are signing on.

...a growing number of men, particularly older, former white-collar workers, instead of the typical blue-collar ones, are applying.The big concern about the swelling ranks is that once people get on disability, they’re unlikely to give it up and go back to work. 

“It’s not like other support programs, such as unemployment insurance, which you lose after a year or two,” says Michael Feroli, chief US economist with JPMorgan.

Of course not!  Not that there were jobs for them anyway.

There's only one small problem:

Social Security’s disability fund, which has been operating short of cash since 2005, is forecast to run out of reserves by 2018.  

But hey, that's years away.  We'll figure out how to tax the rich before then, right?

Well, no, we won't, because there isn't enough money on earth to pay for our existing obligations -- and that's without this rise in disability claims.  But the disability issue is small potatoes; its unfunded liabilities are only a little more than twenty trillion dollars.  The people who are really going to get it are the military retirees, who have been promised more than nine hundred trillion dollars in health care benefits that the government hasn't actually funded.

It's already the case that many people are working until they die, paying taxes that fund a system that seems to be subject to some abuse.  Those are the really smart people, in my opinion.  The people who are putting themselves on government largess are going to be left high and dry when the money runs out.

Seen on Memeorandum

H'Wood snubs Muslim Stone:

Sean Stone, son of controversial director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam in Iran last week and says he’s already experiencing a Hollywood backlash.

Muslims stone Christians on Temple Mount:

A mob of some 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned a group of Christian tourists atop Jerusalem's Temple Mount on Sunday morning. Three of the Israeli police officers who acted to protect the Christian group were wounded by the stone-throwers.

There's a kind of subtle difference in the action going on here... I'm not quite sure how to describe it.

I Guess This Constitutes Praise...

At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction; and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’

The Fitzgerald translation is my favorite. If you want to do yourself a favor, though, don't buy it as a book. The Iliad is oral poetry, and you will do far better to hear it aloud.

The Perils of Doing What You Love

The Hillbilly Hellcats warn you:



Rathkeltair has the same opinion.

Great News for the Local Working Man:

Caterpillar is coming home.

Caterpillar Inc. said it chose a site near Athens, Ga., for a new $200 million factory that will employ about 1,400 people and make construction equipment currently produced in Sagami, Japan.

That will do a lot of good around here.  It's a good choice -- we've got rail lines to Atlanta and Savannah, as well as the port at Charleston, and I-85 running through the territory as well.  This has been a pretty depressed area the last several years, so this is very good to hear.  A lot of my neighbors will be helped by it.

Hey, This Looks Familiar...

I had a horse do this once, with a couple of differences. First, he wasn't as athletic -- which means he didn't jump as far up in the air while coming over, but also that he weighed a lot more. Second, he landed right on me, crushing all the ribs on my right side. I guess that would have been about 2006. Still hurts sometimes.

Just One Little Problem...

You've heard of the Black-Scholes equation?

Black-Scholes underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world's manufacturing industries over the last century. The downside was the invention of ever-more complex financial instruments whose value and risk were increasingly opaque. So companies hired mathematically talented analysts to develop similar formulas, telling them how much those new instruments were worth and how risky they were. Then, disastrously, they forgot to ask how reliable the answers would be if market conditions changed. 

Black and Scholes invented their equation in 1973; Robert Merton supplied extra justification soon after. It applies to the simplest and oldest derivatives: options. There are two main kinds. A put option gives its buyer the right to sell a commodity at a specified time for an agreed price. A call option is similar, but it confers the right to buy instead of sell. The equation provides a systematic way to calculate the value of an option before it matures. Then the option can be sold at any time. The equation was so effective that it won Merton and Scholes the 1997 Nobel prize in economics. (Black had died by then, so he was ineligible.)
...
The Black-Scholes equation relates the recommended price of the option to four other quantities. Three can be measured directly: time, the price of the asset upon which the option is secured and the risk-free interest rate. This is the theoretical interest that could be earned by an investment with zero risk, such as government bonds. The fourth quantity is the volatility of the asset. This is a measure of how erratically its market value changes. The equation assumes that the asset's volatility remains the same for the lifetime of the option, which need not be correct. 

It's a genius act of advanced mathematics, which gives us predictability in an area of uncertainty and allows us to trade options at the level of ten times the total value of a century's production.  There turns out to be just one little problem with it.

Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork.

Oops.  Guess that's why all those folks who used to have good jobs in construction are now raising their kids on the EITC.  It wasn't because they didn't realize how dumb they were; it's because somebody else thought he was too smart.

This seems like a problem for our model too, though.  We just finished a long talk about how markets make better decisions -- at least, when immediate information is available locally.  Now, the financial sector is nothing if not a market.  Isn't that right?

Rewired It

So, a minor issue:  the clothes dryer burned out a while ago.  Since I pretty much never buy anything new, I found a used one I could buy off a guy who didn't need it any more because he'd bought a better one.  When I got it home, I found it had a four-prong plug instead of the older-style three-prong plug.  No problem:  the junker has the right kind of plug.  I stripped it off the old one, wired it up to the new one, and plugged it in.

The dryer ran really loud, really hot, and quit after ten seconds.

Now at first I thought I had just been sold a lemon by a guy who had 'bought a better dryer' because the old one didn't work.  After all, I'd wired it up correctly according to the diagram:  white ground wire on the center, two hot wires on the sides.

After a little internet research, however, I found out that this is a common problem if the dryer is wired wrongly, i.e., if you get the ground on the wrong attachment.  So I went down into the basement and snooped around, and found out that the previous owner of the house apparently did the dryer wiring themselves as an aftermarket.  It's a rather amazing job -- not up to code, and somewhat more resembling a spider web than a professional installation.  Still, it worked for two years, so I figured it probably still worked -- it just wasn't wired right according to code.

Once I sorted that out, I found the true ground and swapped the wires around, and the dryer works perfectly now.  I kind of wish the previous owner of the house had mentioned his little adventures in electricity, though; but I suppose he would have believed that it would have lowered my offering price for the house.  (He would have been right, too.)

Recruiting

Apparently Alabama is mellowing with age.

Four-star junior tailback Alvin Kamara of Norcross, Ga., couldn't believe what he found in his mailbox after getting home from school one recent day.  Or rather, what he found falling out of his mailbox.

"There were 105 letters from Alabama," Kamara told Rivals.com.

Sending a kid lots of letters is a really nice way to ask him to join your football team, especially given how much work it is for someone from Alabama to write a letter.

Still, it sounds pretty weak compared to the old Bear Bryant play.

"If I wanted a kid bad enough," Bear Bryant of Alabama once said, "I used every trick I could think of.... [W]hen I was at Kentucky I dressed our manager, Jim Murphy, in a priest's outfit to recruit Gene Donaldson away from Notre Dame.  Maybe Jim Murphy did tell Donaldson he was a priest.  Shucks, I'd have told him Murphy was Pope....

Well, the old days are gone forever.

The Story of the "U" in UK

This article from History Today begins in a gratifying way:

Anybody who enters into even a casual discussion with a US citizen about their country’s constitution will be struck by the ease with which they reference names, dates and significant events in the creation – and subsequent amendment – of that 225-year-old document.

How nice that this is the perception!  Most of us would prefer only to deepen American appreciation for the Constitution and its history.

The author goes on to note that his own countrymen are not as excited about the constitutional process that underlies their present union.  There are some reasons for this, including the fact that one of the most significant acts of union was the 1801 acts that brought Ireland into union with existing Great Britain.  Technically two different acts -- one in each parliament -- it turns out that no one was much interested in celebrating the bicentennial in 2001.

Ben Johnson and the Cavalier Poets

The Times (of London) has an article on Ben Johnson, "one of our greatest poets – I know not how good a one[.]"

In his turbulent career Jonson had many scrapes with the law, including prosecution for manslaughter, having killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in Hoxton Fields. Jonson escaped the gallows thanks to the old law excusing those who could read the so-called “neck-verse” from Psalm 51 as a test of literacy. In several plays, Jonson echoes his own experience with allusions to characters being “saved by the book”.

The Cavalier Poets were a really interesting group, sadly not as well known these days.   They favored a life of courage and boldness, humane and even bawdy:  one of my favorite of their poems is built around a dream in which the poet imagined himself as a vine twining about his lady love, but found when he awoke that he was "more like a stock than like a vine."  The allusion to the thick root stock, contrasted with the qualities of the vines that grow from it, would have been obvious enough in a more agricultural age.

One of the reasons I like the Cavalier Poets so well is that they often force us to rethink whose 'side' we are on in reading history.  It is very common for Americans to take the side of revolution against the kings to be the side of progress, and to see in Oliver Cromwell a kind of predecessor.  For part of the country, that's even somewhat true -- the Roundheads were the ancestors of the Puritans of Boston.  Yet the attitudes of modern Boston have nothing to do with the Puritan ones, and will find very much more to recognize in the rowdy, bawdy Cavaliers.

There is an ironic reversal here in the South, for whom the Cavaliers make up many of our proper ancestors.  In Theodore Roosevelt's day it was a commonplace of historians to divide the nation into the Roundhead Yankees and the Cavalier Southerners; Roosevelt does it himself in The Winning of the West.  Yet of course, today the South is the Bible Belt, and far more likely to exhibit something like Puritanism than anywhere settled by the Puritans.  On the other hand, the South is also the home of Outlaw Country Music -- and David Allen Coe would find much to recognize in Ben Johnson, as might Willie Nelson, or Johnny Cash, or Johnny Paycheck.

In any case, it turns out that Ben Johnson was buried in Westminster Abbey -- head first.

(H/t:  Arts & Letters Daily)

Speaking of the Difference in Winters...

...a discussion of the long winter of Europe, versus our own potential contention.

Snow in Rome, Pipes in Florida

It's been such a warm winter here that, even with this week's short cold spell, I've kind of assumed that the winter was warm everywhere.  My sister sends pictures of the snowfall in the Tetons, so I know it's not warm everywhere; but I suppose I figured it was probably 'warm for the Tetons in winter.'

Apparently this is an unusually snowy winter in Italy, however!



(Hat tip to Medieval News, though I gather the snow is current.)

Meanwhile, down at the Caloosahatchee Celtic Festival, two weeks ago in Flordia, they were singing about the Holy Land... sleeveless.  Shirtless, even.



UPDATE:

Drift back to the fall, and you can hear that piper at something closer to his best... along with a banjo player. I'm not actually in this video, but I easily could have been:  I was right there all day, just not at this very moment.  Several friends of mine pass in and out on the left hand side at times, though you won't be able to tell anything about them, being in the distance as they are.  Still, a pleasant memory.

Something Important about Rick Santorum

MEGADETH endorses him!



No, not that.

Actually, the news story that I found most striking today was this description of his economic plan.  Now, his plan is interesting to me because it does several things that are outside the usual playbooks for either party:

[In addition to cutting spending by $5T in five years he wants to flatten the tax code...]  

His plan would also likely mean a cut for many of the tens of millions of households making between $17,400 and around $50,000. They'd presumably fall into the 10 percent bracket, down from the 15 percent rate they currently pay. In keeping with his traditional views on social issues, Santorum also wants to encourage family formation (he and his wife have six children themselves), by tripling the personal deduction for each child, and by scrapping marriage tax penalties. 

Unlike Mitt Romney, Santorum has said he opposes a rise in the minimum wage, although he wouldn't scrap the concept altogether, as some in his party would. As well as auditing the Fed, he'd have it focus only on controlling inflation, and not on promoting employment. Santorum supports Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to save money by transforming Medicare into a system of private insurance. And like every 2012 Republican presidential candidate current or former, he'd repeal President Obama's health-care law. 

So far, that's a plan that sticks pretty closely to the standard GOP script. But other aspects of Santorum's proposal set him apart from his party, by grappling with issues of concern to Americans further down the economic spectrum. 

Again like most of his GOP rivals, Santorum would lower the corporate tax rate. But he'd establish two new rates: 17.5 percent -- a 50 percent cut from the current 35 percent rate -- for most businesses, and zero for manufacturers. The goal, his website says, is to "multiply job opportunities for struggling middle-income families and renew communities that have lost critical manufacturing jobs." 

In campaign appearances and debate performances, Santorum has often appeared eager to reinforce that focus on restoring middle-class jobs -- implicitly bucking the standard Republican line that derides issues of economic inequality and mobility as class warfare. 

"We need to talk about income mobility," he implored his party at a Republican debate on economic issues in November, noting the sky-high jobless rate for Americans without college degrees. "We need to talk about people at the bottom of the income scale being able to get necessary skills and rise so they can support themselves and a family."  

By the same token, Santorum hasn't shied away from mentioning poverty. "I don't believe that poverty is a permanent condition," he declares in the plan. "How do we effectively address poverty in rural and urban America? We promote jobs, marriage, quality education and access to capital and embrace the supports of civil society."

Now, since we're in the middle of a bruising primary battle, let's assume that whomever the final nominee happens to be will adopt the best ideas out of all the competing plans to take forward to the general election. What are the best ideas here? What might need to go?  What do other candidates have that you'd like to see added to the final plan?  For example, do you like minimum wage increases, or do you prefer to avoid them, or would you like to see the minimum wage discarded entirely?

Do you like the concept of fighting poverty by promoting marriage -- we've often seen good evidence that getting and staying married is among the most crucial factors in staying out of poverty.  Will increasing the incentives for marriage cut poverty?

What about the tax benefit for kids?  It appears he is proposing a deduction increase that can only answer to your actual liability, rather than an increase in the Child Tax Credit that (like the EITC) it can bring a "refund" even though you didn't pay the taxes in actual dollars.  At the lower end this might move some families off welfare; although some on the right regard the EITC-type plan as a form of welfare, since it results in transfer payments to poorer families.

I don't think I agree, though, because families raising children is what produces the best and most successful citizens, who will go on to pay taxes in the future.  It is therefore a kind of public good, in that all of us reap the benefits whether or not we pay into it (at least, all of us who live long enough to go on Medicare, or drive on the highways).  It's something we might reasonably support, not out of charity, but because it's the right thing to do, and because -- like making sure children are educated -- it works to the benefit of all of us.

Anyway, it's an interesting set of proposals.  What ideas did other candidates have you'd like to see added? Which of these ideas do you not like, and why?