Miss 'em both

The comments below got started on the good that Roger Miller can do for your mood. Here's a guaranteed pick-me-up with Roger Miller and Johnny Cash goofing together on stage.

John Carter of Mars

I took Joel's advice and went to see the movie tonight.  It appears to be headed to box office disaster, but I'm really not sure why.  There is quite a lot to recommend the movie.  The very few things that annoyed me about the movie seem to be greatly in line with popular culture:  the quick edits toward the beginning tracking his multiple escape attempts, for example, annoy me but are very popular just now.

Likewise -- to tie this to an earlier discussion -- there is an inexplicable scene where the heroine shows up the hero in physical combat.  The same hero personally destroys nearly an entire army a few minutes later while the heroine flees for her life; but when they are on screen together she shows him up, and he states that he ought to be hiding behind her.  Later in the movie, in case anyone missed it, they repeat the sequence.

But again, this is par for the course today.  Whatever is driving the box office troubles the movie is having, it isn't that.

I wonder if the problem is just the name.  The story dates to 1917, and had a much more evocative title in the original.  "John Carter" could be a movie about a dryer salesman.  It seems like a small thing -- a very small thing -- but perhaps the difficulties the movie is experiencing really just do come down to a name that doesn't explain the film.  One ought not to judge a book by the cover, but one very often does so all the same.

Strandbeests

I want one right now.

H/t: oh, you know. Just go over to Rocket Science and click on all the links today. It's a good batch.

This Is Your Steak on Drugs

I wanted to write yesterday about reports that the FDA was poised to ban low-level prophylactic antibiotics in livestock, but the initial news accounts didn't make it very clear what the court was proposing. This link (h/t Rocket Science, as so often) does a good job of citing directly to the decision and providing some background and context:

[T]he Commissioner of the FDA or the Director of the [Center for Veterinary Medicine] must re-issue a notice of the proposed withdrawals (which may be updated) and provide an opportunity for a hearing to the relevant drug sponsors; if drug sponsors timely request hearings and raise a genuine and substantial issue of fact, the FDA must hold a public evidentiary hearing. If, at the hearing, the drug sponsors fail to show that use of the drugs is safe, the Commissioner must issue a withdrawal order.

The Court notes the limits of this decision. Although the Court is ordering the FDA to complete mandatory withdrawal proceedings for the relevant penicillin and tetracycline NADAs/ANADAs, the Court is not ordering a particular outcome as to the final issuance of a withdrawal order. If the drug sponsors demonstrate that the subtherapeutic use of penicillin and/or tetracyclines is safe, then the Commissioner cannot withdraw approval.

The comments to this report raise the predictable issue of whether small-government types should be up in arms or not. It's a good question. CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations) are pretty horrifying from a number of points of view, not least the impact on public health. Is this one of the areas where even libertarians should welcome regulatory interference?

Nevertheless, somehow I don't see the FDA issuing a prohibition of livestock antobiotics any time soon. Much as I'd prefer to see meat raised to Joel Salatin's or Michael Pollan's standards, the bulk of our meat comes from CAFOs. No one's going to get away with shutting that industry down overnight. You think high gas prices are going to be a headache in the November elections, wait till all meat goes for pasture-raised organic prices. And what would we do with all that subsidized corn? The animals can't be fed on a pure diet of corn for months without prophylactic antiobiotics to keep it from killing them before they're fattened up.

How to Write Like a Scientist

The mournful author's Ph.D. advisor objected to the over-poetical use of the word "lone" to mean "only" in the sentence “PvPlm is the lone plasmepsin in the food vacuole of Plasmodium vivax.” It exuded romanticism and

conjured images of PvPlm perched on a cliff’s edge, staring into the empty chasm, weeping gently for its aspartic protease companions. Oh, the good times they shared. Afternoons spent cleaving scissile bonds. Lazy mornings decomposing foreign proteins into their constituent amino acids at a nice, acidic pH. Alas, lone plasmepsin, those days are gone.

This could almost as easily have been entitled "How to Write Like a Lawyer." One of the federal judges in Houston first engaged my passionate admiration by excoriating the FDIC's evil flunky lawyers' views on sovereign immunity, but I admire him almost equally for his advice on legal writing. He once told a seminar's attendees that no judge was ever going to tell us, "Son, your brief is clear, compelling, and accurate on the law -- but it's just too darn short." He asked us whether it would be too much to ask that we find a place right in the first paragraph that gave him a clue what we wanted him to do. Yes, he was sure our story of injustice was shocking and fascinating, but what kind of piece of paper signed by a federal judge did we expect to alter the sad situation? Just give him a hint. Reverse a judgment? Issue an injunction? Must he wait until page 8 to find this information? And for pity's sake, could we please name the parties something brief and comprehensible? It's easier to keep track of "the Lender" than "the consortium of loan participants for which the First National Commercial Bank, as successor in interest to National First Bank of Commerce, serves as agent for limited purposes." But lawyers agonize over these choices.

The science writer also takes on the justly-reviled passive tense:

Why can’t we write like other people write? Why can’t we tell our science in interesting, dynamic stories? Why must we write dryly? (Or, to rephrase that last sentence in the passive voice, as seems to be the scientific fashion, why must dryness be written by us?)

H/t Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Contredanse

No special point here:  just a beautiful piece of music for a likely spring day.

Materialism

The subject of the free market crops up here regularly, often in the context of worrying about whether it's a synonym for abject materialism, or the tendency to put a crude dollars-and-cents price on everything. I prefer this statement of the purpose of studying economics, which applies as well to the operation of a free market:

We shall find that the economic relations constitute a machinery by which men devote their energies to the immediate accomplishment of each other’s purposes in order to secure the ultimate accomplishment of their own, irrespective of what those purposes of their own may be, and therefore irrespective of the egoistic or altruistic nature of the motives which dictate them and which stimulate efforts to accomplish them.

In other words, economics is about choices in a world where you can't have everything at once. As Thomas Sowell says, it's the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. They aren't all material resources; sometimes they're measured in the time or effort available in our lives, always a finite quantity.

In this sense of a "market," people make choices and trade-offs. The point is not to reduce every trade-off to a monetary one, but to let the choices be made by each person rather than by a distant, crowned bureaucrat.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

See, this is what I'm talking about

I mean, to what perennial topic at the Hall is this story not relevant? Getting serious, culturally, about reproduction. Gender role-bending. Even a more balanced view of the value of snakes. The only issue I can't tie in is education.

Individuation

There are two Medieval philosophers whose names mean, roughly, "John the Scot."  The first (and possibly more important) was actually Irish -- "Scotti" was the Roman name for the Irish, and it was Irish settlers in places like Dal Riada who eventually conquered what came to be known as Scotland.  The second (and certainly more famous), John Duns Scotus, is an oddity:  a major Aristotelian philosopher of the Franciscan school.  There's a major division in Christian theology between the Dominicans and the Franciscans, which concerns the nature of God.  Both agree that God's nature is singular, but they disagree over whether it is Will or Reason.  That is to say that the Franciscans believe that God is Love, and the Dominicans that God is Logos.  Aristotle more naturally fits the Dominican approach; but Duns Scotus was an exception.  He wrote some interesting things about love from an Aristotelian perspective.

One of the things that Duns Scotus treats is the problem of individuation.  Aristotelian sciences are all based around genera:  we might say that you would have a science of birds, similar to how we divide groups of animals into a genus, and then subdivide into species, and further subdivide species into individuals.  Duns Scotus says that this is backwards:  we ought to start with the individual as such, because the individual exists as an individual thing, not as a subdivision of a species or a genus.  When we group individuals into species or genera, we are engaging in an act of intellection:  we are making things by building these groupings.  The things themselves are just individual things.

In this he follows Aristotle's instinct when Aristotle speaks not of genera but of forms.  Plato held that the form was primary, and we who have the form of Man participate in a higher form; Aristotle held that the form is only actualized in the individual men.  Duns Scotus is following that line of thought into places Aristotle didn't care to take it.

The technical way of saying this for Duns Scotus is that 'individuation cannot come from privation.'  That is to say, you can't get an individual by starting with a group, and dividing out the one you want.

I've decided he's wrong about that.  You can.  We can get "this stone" from "stone" by breaking off a piece. It makes sense to individuate out of a genera.  We can get "this plant" out of a plant by dividing it -- at least for many species of plants and, indeed, fungi.  You can cut off pieces, dip them in rooting compound, and get a new individual plant.  Even among animals, there are some you can subdivide and get new individuals:  worms of some kinds, for example.

Yet he isn't wrong about us.  He isn't wrong about dogs or horses.  There's something different going on at our level of organization that makes his general ruling, while correct for us, a fallacy of composition:  an assumption that what holds at one level of organization holds for all levels of organization.

So when he speaks of love, and says that love points first and most to a particular individual, he is right:  but he is right about how we love another of our kind, not about love in general.

What does that mean for how God loves -- or, if we were to try to fight this from a Platonic metaphysics, what consequences follow from this break in the order?  There is a particular honor for those things that are individuated primarily.  That is to say, there's something special about being a man, or a dog, or a horse:  things of this kind.

Now, what follows from that I don't know yet.  But it is different, and that is important.

Happiness is an Easy Catch

I was out this evening until after dark; the motorcycle light was barely enough to get the gate to the road unlocked, but I opened it and came in -- closing it behind me, of course, as you always do with gates.  On the way up the driveway, I noticed that one of the pasture gates was wide open, which it should not be.  However, we had separated the horses a few days ago to make them easier to work with, and I figured the wife had forgotten to close the gate when she put them back together.

So after I came in to the house, I said, "I see you put the horses back together today."

She said, "No, I didn't."

I informed her that Avalon's gate was wide open, and then I got my rope and went outside into the front yard.  No sooner had I closed the door and stepped off the porch, Avalon appeared from not very far away and walked up to me. You can imagine a thousand-pound black horse detaching herself from the shadows beneath the trees. She paused just out of arm's length, as if she expected to be in trouble.

"You're not in trouble," I said.  "We probably don't even need the rope.  Come on with me."  Then I turned and walked to the upper gate to the pasture with the other horse, opened it and walked in.  She followed calmly behind me, sniffed the hay, and went over to say hello to the other horse.  I walked back out and closed the gate, and returned to the house.

Just as I was getting to the porch the wife came out with a lantern in one hand, a food bucket in the other, and a rope draped over her shoulders.  "Did you see her?" she said.

"It's done," I said, and walked back into the house.

That was eminently satisfying.

Darklands

About twenty years ago, a now-defunct software company called MicroProse wrote a computer game that intended to be an accurate simulation of the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th Century:  with the one twist that all the stories people were beginning to tell about witches would be true.  The result was Darklands, a sort of rarity in being a masterpiece of scholarship as well as an interesting game.  It contains accurate period music, brief but accurate histories of dozens of saints, accurate geography, and a landscape that features institutions of the period such as the Hanseatic League and the Medici banking house.

I mention it because this weekend it is for sale for $2.99 from GOG.com.  Some of you probably remember it from of old; others of you may find it to be a fascinating experience.

The Demographic Dilemma

My weaving-and-spinning friend's horrified reaction to her conservative Christian friend's unchecked fertility got me thinking about demographics. It struck me that her environmentally-inspired insistence on the one-family-one-child approach was self-limiting; as James Taranto says, if you don't have children, odds are your kids won't either.

Mark Steyn made a splash several years ago with his book "America Alone," arguing that the Western Civilization we take for granted will collapse demographically and be replaced by cultures with higher reproduction rates, notably Islam. It seems that Islam, as well, however, is under demographic pressure. This PJ Media article argues that catastrophic drops in birth rates in all cultures are most strongly linked to increased literacy rates. Backward cultures thus face a cruel choice in the race to compete globally: get educated to compete, and you'll simply die out. As the author notes:

In short, the Muslim world half a century from now can expect the short end of the stick from the modern world. It has generated only two great surpluses, namely people and oil. By the middle of the century both of these will have begun to dwindle.

Why should increased literacy undermine the birth rate? Are we really just looking at Gloria Steinem's famous quip, when asked why she didn't marry: "I don't mate in captivity"? Do a dangerously large fraction of educated women inevitably adopt the view that the child-bearing and -rearing deck is stacked against them?

One of my favorite science-fiction novels is "The Mote in God's Eye," in which the central problem of an alien culture is their biological inability to control their fertility. If they don't reproduce regularly, they die. As a result, because they are bottled up in an isolated solar system from which they can't escape, they regularly suffer Malthusian disasters and bomb themselves back to the Stone Age. The novel's assumption was that human beings were lucky in their ability to control their fertility, at least until they could expand off-planet. For most of our evolutionary history, however, we had only a modest ability to pull this trick off. Our experiment with reliable birth control is only a few generations old. What if the technological development that permits birth control turns out to be cultural suicide within a very few generations for everyone that acquires the ability?

If the bulk of educated women will predictably reject child-rearing, but uneducated cultures cannot compete effectively on a global scale, will we have to re-invent the child-rearing process in order to persuade women to keep doing it? Or will cultures have to find a way to let the men get educated enough to compete, while preventing the women from doing so?

Stand Your Ground

There's been a lot of talk about the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida.  I haven't joined in on that issue, and don't mean to do so yet because so far there hasn't even been a decision made about prosecution.  It sounds as if there ought to be adequate reason to go before a grand jury, but so far no decision on that has been made.

What I do find objectionable is the use of this tragedy to raise a general claim against the principle of the "Stand Your Ground" law that Florida has.  An extension of the Castle doctrine to all places where one may lawfully be, it simply holds that you cannot be legally forced to flee from criminal violence:  you have a right to defend yourself from it.

Our friends on the left have raised this case as an example of the law allowing for the killing of innocents by bullies.  Since no decisions have come down on prosecution, that's at best premature:  but it is when they try to show this is part of a trend that they go most astray.

The Florida courts have upheld the law and issued some truly shocking findings.

This has led to some stunning verdicts in the state. In Tallahassee in 2008, two rival gangs engaged in a neighborhood shootout, and a 15-year-old African American male was killed in the crossfire. 

That's almost a complete misreading of the actual events.  What actually happened in Tallahassee is documented here.  You'll notice a few small differences in the judge's account vice Mother Jones' account.

1)  The "15-year-old African American male" was a rival gang member.

2)  He was not "killed in the crossfire," but was in fact the target of the bullets that killed him.

3)  He was armed, having come to that place with the express intention of engaging in a gunfight, and,

4)  He shot first.

That's a little bit different picture, isn't it?

How about a different picture of the statistics in Florida, thanks to the CATO institute?

Between 2004 (the year before the law’s enactment) and 2010 violent crime in Florida dropped sharply, and homicides per capita also dropped, though not sharply.

We ought all to hope for justice for Mr. Martin; and it is very early in the process for anyone to despair about such justice being achieved.  As for the wider argument that some wish to make out of this case, it does not hold water.

Teaching to the Test

The indispensable Iowahawk made a 2003 entry in a "Why am I a Democrat" contest, including this succinct explanation of the welfare state: "I am a Democrat because I believe in helping those in need. All of us, you and I, have an obligation to those less fortunate. You go first, okay? I'm a little short this week."

But he really caught my attention with this quip about a subject that's been worrying me lately: "I am a Democrat because I recognize that education is important. Very, very, extremely very important. We must increase spending on education and enact important education reforms, such as eliminating standardized tests. Because we can never hope to measure this beautiful, elusive, important thing we call education."

He refers, of course, to the problem of "teaching to the test." It's been years since I engaged in a discussion about the public schools here in Texas without hearing at least one person lament the problem of "teaching to the test." I used to ask what it meant, then gave up. It came up again last week, when I was hanging out with the Fiber Women, several of whom home-school. (One does it because her strong religious principles. Our hostess has this in common with her, but has often remarked to me how incomprehensible she finds her friend's religious convictions on the subject of birth control. It seems so obvious to her that a truly moral person would not burden the planet with four children. She literally cannot fathom how her friend views procreation; her friend, of course, is only too familiar with the opposite point of view, but chooses to go her own way and not argue about it. They have other attitudes in common to sustain their friendship.)

But back to schools. Here's what mystifies me: what's wrong with teaching to a test? Why is it so difficult to devise a means to determine whether the kids are learning what we want the schools to impart to them, and to determine whether one school does a better job than another at this task? Do I imagine that a child's entire worth can be summed up in a standardized test? No, of course not. Am I blind to the fact that kids from disadvantaged homes will find many aspects of eduction unusually challenging? Obviously not. But have we really come to the point of arguing that most under-performing students are lost causes as a result of their families or neighborhoods? I don't blame a doctor who can't cure a dead body, but I also don't offer to pay him an annual salary for trying. Similarly, if a condition is impossible to diagnose, then I neither blame the doctor for missing it nor pay him for the effort. The "I'm not to blame for failure" argument is great for answering undeserved withering scorn, but it's not a good reason to keep signing paychecks -- it's a good reason to encourage educators to find a more productive line or work. The task of education isn't hopeless, or we wouldn't keep at it. If it's not hopeless, and we have any idea at all what we're aiming to accomplish, then why is it a bad idea to find a means for judging the results of our efforts?

Once you can accept the idea that it's theoretically possible to devise a test for determining whether each student has benefited from the year he just spent in class, then the question becomes whether the school was doing something to impart that benefit, or if the kid merely soaked it up by osmosis as a result of the inexorable march of the calendar. Presumably if anything about the comfort of the lives of the people employed by the school are going to depend on the results of the test, they will be motivated to see the kids do well on it. This leads to the dread "teaching to the test." But what is the problem with that? To put it another way, if teachers are drilling the kids in something stupid and irrelevant in order to increase their chances of testing well, then isn't the test stupid? And if so, why can't we craft a better one?

This week I decided to read articles objecting to "teaching to the test" until I encountered a sensible idea somewhere, but I gave up. Teaching to the test is bad because it focuses on narrow facts instead of the thrill of learning or "critical thinking skills." The kids are only learningtesting strategies. Education is too complex to be judged by a checklist. The kids spend all their time on reading, writing, and ciphering instead of social studies and "enrichments." The test only measures the socio-economic status of the kids' families. High-stakes tests encouragecheating and undermine self-esteem. Schools should teach cooperative learning skills instead of knowledge. Fine, but can they read, write, and cipher? If not, what are we paying the school for? If the school doesn't know how to judge whether the kids are learning this stuff, how about letting the parents decide, and vote with their feet? Yes, I know that professional educators worry that parents aren't up to the job, but after all, the educators just confessed that they're incapable of making the judgment, too, and someone has to. Otherwise, the teachers devolve into monopolistic baby-sitters with public pensions.

What I'm starting to see now are articles about the shiny new field of "curriculum alignment," which apparently means devising a test that has something to do with what we were hoping the kids would learn. This concept differs from existing tests in a way that continues to mystify me. Whose bright idea was it in the first place to give the kids tests that weren't aligned with the curriculum we wanted them to master?

It's not that I don't value an education system that leaves all its participants with a lifelong thirst for self-instruction, not to mention good citizenship and other sterling qualities, but these are kids, not graduate students. They have to start with the basic knowledge, or all the thirst in the world isn't going to help society much. All those nifty cooperative learning and critical thinking skills are great if they actually produced some learning. There has to be some good reason for these ad valorem taxes, beyond providing a place to park the kids while we're at work, and a secure retirement for the products of teaching colleges.

These are no ordinary chihuahuas

I see this story entirely from the perspective of the poor dogs, ditched by their shiftless owner and spurned by their clueless neighbors. What kind of useless neighborhood says this about a "pack" of five or ten little tail-wagging chihuahuas: "My daughter -- she'll be outside, but then I have to have her come back inside because they all -- I'm afraid they're going to -- you know what I mean." Um, no, I'm not really following your point.

Fast and Furious

The LA Times reports on its unraveling of the knot:

When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show. 

So the ATF arrested someone wanted by DEA, whom they let go because they wanted to use him to get two other guys, who were already working for the FBI?  And along the way they got a Border Patrol Agent killed?

Let's have some appropriate music for our Federal Law Enforcement team!

The career not taken

Douglas said something very kind below about my bee-adorned mailbox, which happened to touch on the central crisis of my life.

Though a successful architectural student, I wasn't cut out to be an architect. I have no gift for arranging spaces to be beautiful or surprising. My gift instead lay in working out floor plans in two dimensions, and solving problems, and taking standardized tests. (It's a little-known fact that standardized tests are designed to measure how close the test-takers are to someone exactly like me.) I love the good architecture created by other people. But figuring out that architecture was a blind alley for myself was the most wrenching decision I ever made: dropping out of the graduate school that had awarded a full scholarship. I drifted for a long time afterwards before stumbling onto law school. Then in every single interview for three years, I had to answer the question, "Why did you drop out of architecture to pursue law?" Though I eventually worked out a brief answer that seemed to satisfy people, the choice occasionally bubbles to the surface to this day. There is a haunting line in a Leonard Cohen song: "The skyline is like skin on a drum I'll never mend." For whatever reason, the compulsion was unanswerable.

We were told in architecture school that we'd be shot if they caught us reading "The Fountainhead," but the horse was long out of the barn on that insidious romantic message.

I was meant to be a decorative artist, probably: in an earlier age I'd have made sure that all the handmade items like swords and doorknobs and keyhole plates were properly embellished, like those gorgeous Scythian tools carved with reindeer. My bee, for instance, lit me up on all registers, as something worth doing in its own right. He makes me happy every time I drive up to my gate. In contrast, no building design of my own creation ever once inspired me with a burning desire to see it built. I figured, an architect has to be practically willing to die to see his stuff go up, or it will never happen, it's such a difficult process. In my heart of hearts, I didn't like my designs. How would I persuade a wavering client to buy and build them?

Here's a mosaic that lights me up, in the Houston Intercontinental Airport, designed and executed by Dixie Friend Gay. It took a year's work from four artisans and 1-1/2 million pieces of glass tile. This definitely would be a job worth having. Check out the other views in the link; this work is on a long, undulating wall. I want one.

Never cared that much for law in its own right, but I could make a bazillion bucks and retire early, and a passion for identifying logical flaws makes me a good brief-writer and law review editor if not an all-around good lawyer.

The First Day of Spring, Actual:

The Hound of the Hall

Happy Vernal Equinox!  Subjective Spring started weeks ago here, but today we reach the real event.  As you can see, at least one of us is celebrating.

Fire-fightin'

I believe that T99 is associated with her local VFD, and my father was a long-time Captain of ours.  I expect you'll find this interesting:



The Fire Critic is asking opinions on this one, which it considers quite aggressive (although they note they don't know from the cam if there is a backup line behind the guy).  (H/t:  FARK.)

The End of the First Amendment

News from Chicago:

The officer who handcuffed them is recorded on camera warning members of the media that their First Amendment rights could be terminated.  "Your First Amendment rights can be terminated if you're creating a scene or whatever," the officer said.  When asked how they were creating a scene, the officer said, "Your presence is creating a scene."

From the District of Columbia:

HR 347 was recently signed into law by President Obama. This statute had wide support amongst both parties of Congress. In essence, it criminalizes disruptive behavior upon government grounds, at specially designated national events (Super Bowl, nominating conventions, etc.) and anywhere that Secret Service is protecting “any” person.

Since all of the presidential candidates are now receiving Secret Service protection, that means no "disruptive behavior" anywhere near anywhere that anyone running for president might be speaking.

Thus the freedoms of speech, assembly and the press.  As Elise notes, we're also seeing an end to the freedom of religious expression insofar as it pertains to how one lives one's life, as apart from merely how one prays in private.

The issue is so clearly one of violating the First Amendment that I am unable to find any common ground with anyone who doesn’t see that. We have nothing to say to each other on this topic. And their belief either that this does not violate the First Amendment or that violating the First Amendment is acceptable is so inexplicable that we don’t really have anything to say to each other about anything else related to the Constitution or governance in general. 

Furthermore, it doesn’t matter how this situation comes out. Even if the Administration backs off completely on the contraception mandate for all employers, it’s too late. Even if the Supreme Court rules that the mandate is unconstitutional, it’s too late. That a President of the United States believes it is acceptable to simply ignore the First Amendment is a sea change in our form of government. Perhaps if the Administration had established this mandate and every single person and institution other than President Obama and Secretary Sebelius had screamed bloody murder, I could believe that we had, in a moment of national inattention, elected as President one of the only two people in the United States who consider the Bill of Rights irrelevant. But that wasn’t the case; Obama and Sebelius’ attitude toward the Constitution is clearly so widespread that there is no going back.

We'll have to decide if Elise is right that the First cannot be saved.  If so, we'll have to move on to the Second.  That is not a light matter, not at all:  but consider her argument.  There is very widespread support for simply compelling people to violate their beliefs:  and not merely to fail to do something their faith says is right (which might apply to human sacrifice, in some religions), but positively to do something their faith tells them is wrong.

The only obvious parallel lies in the draft, which compels military service from all citizens.  America's history of support for conscientious objectors is mixed, but has generally found a way to recognize and offer alternatives to most who felt such objections.  It's unclear why war should be an easier place for such objectors than the provision of contraception or abortifacients, the need for which is debatable rather than existential.

Bristol Palin's Got A Spine of Steel

It's no surprise to discover it, but it's impressive all the same.

Ancestry

Here is something unexpected:  a video of the great-grandfather of my own little girl.

A Fairy Tale Wedding

At least, it reminds me of a fairy tale we were recently discussing.

Apparently there is some division in the commentariat as to whether or not this shouldn't be an acceptable form of marriage.

I believe everyone has the right to marry, regardless of sexual preference. For some people being alone is what feels most natural. Shouldn't they too be entitled to tax breaks? 

Sure, why not?  And this way no one will ever interfere with their right to visit their spouse in the hospital.

(I also like the suggestion that this approach to marriage really streamlines the adultery process.)

I guess we've reached the point that the two-parent family has been so completely undercut that no one remembers why married couples were given tax breaks at all.  If mostly we're raising kids with single or divorced parents, what's the point?  In fact, it's downright unfair:  the married couple already has natural advantages.  They shouldn't get a tax break, too:  the tax breaks should go to the ones who are doing it the hard way.  (As, indeed, they already mostly do, since EITC is tied to relative poverty, and poverty correlates strongly with these "hard way" types of families.)

Song of the Working Man

Rick Santorum, though he himself is a wealthy man and a former Senator, shows working-class audiences that he understands them by talking about his grandfather.  His grandfather was a miner, and Santorum's Iowa speech talked about the old man's funeral.  Looking at the corpse, at the funeral, he focused on the hands:  "Those hands," he said, "dug freedom for me."

I feel inclined to tell a few stories this morning, about some men I know.



The first one of these is the father of two kids, both special-needs.  Between their needs and surgeries, he's a million dollars in debt.  To carry that debt he works two jobs.  He's an officer in the US Navy reserves, which means he has to travel out of state for duty on a regular basis.  His full-time job requires him to rise and leave by four AM some mornings every week, and keeps him at work until six or seven at night most nights.  His boss is a miserable human being who can't be bothered to speak civilly to him, even though it's my friend's willingness to come in early that sets the boss up for whatever success he enjoys in the day.  I hear he just took a pay cut.

I once told him I thought what he was doing for his kids was noble.  He laughed, rather darkly, and went on to talk about something else.  Last Christmas he sent me a card with his family's picture on it.

--

Another man I know grew up much as I did, racing fast cars through Appalachia.  As a young man he joined the Army.  He became a sergeant, and then got out; he and his wife had some kids and he went to work for a company.  He tried to move up the ranks, but never got very far, ending up in middle-management.  His wife decided she didn't like being home with the kids, so she went back to work as soon as she could; then she decided she didn't like the job, so she wanted to go back to school.  He supported her through all that, and her failed business venture.  One day she got angry with him over something, some fight, and left for a while.  He later told me that he'd been dressing for work that morning, and happened to see his pistol laying on a shelf.  He told me he thought, "If I shoot myself, I won't have to go to work today."

Fortunately he had an upbringing that steeled him against moments of despair.  Things worked out with her and him.  Still, I don't know if she ever knew, or understood that it was really only ever all for her.  When it didn't look to him like it mattered to her, he'd rather have died than face his job even one more day.

--

One of the men I like best in the world not only was but is an Army sergeant, at this point a senior NCO.  He was a man who came from a working-man's background, never did well in school.  He had never managed to read a whole book in his life when I met him.  I don't know why the education system didn't figure out how to help him, but it never did, and when he got married and had a few kids there was a long time when he couldn't find work.  This would have been about the time of the economic downturn from the first Bush administration:  the one that caused him not to get re-elected.  My friend was a casualty of that recession.

One day he was at home, waiting for his wife to get off work, having almost given up hope of ever being worth anything to his family.  An Army recruiting commercial came on television, and promised him all the good things those commercials do.  He went right then to a recruiter, who assured him -- being as how he was a husband and father -- that the Army would take care to station him close to home so he could support his family and still be with them.  He signed that very day.  His first duty station was Korea.

He went on to serve in Somalia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Iraq.  He had sixty-six kills in OIF 1.  Along the way he was blown up by a mortar round, and had to be retrained for a support position.  The Army picked one for him that required a lot of skill at reading and writing.  When I met him -- in Iraq again, in his new role -- he was gritting his teeth and fighting to make it work.  He finally did, due to nothing but hard work and dedication.  I thought he would like Louis L'amour's Sackett novels, so I gave him one, and it was the first book he ever read all the way through.  He went on to read all of them.  He understood them and they spoke to him, he told me, because "These books are all about guys who are fighting for their family."

It happens he and I share a birthday.  We could almost be brothers, except he has blue eyes.

--

I could tell you about my own family:  about my great-grandfather, who was a farmer in rural Tennessee around the turn of the last century, but who somehow managed to put his eight kids -- all sons -- through trade school.  Or I could tell you about my grandfather, who was a welder, who managed to put his sons through college.

Each of these men is a kind of tragic hero.  They've suffered, greatly, in the service of those they love.  I don't know how many people have taken the time to understand just how much their sacrifices have cost them.

I think I chose the right word when I told my one friend that he was noble.  This kind of sacrifice in the service of the beloved is the mark of a man of the highest honor.  It is the mark of true nobility.

Decorative Arts

I don't have any tattoos. Not that I object to them in principle, but two things stop me: hep C, and my mania for decorative arts, especially those that conform to an irregular three-dimensional surface, like pottery, or the body. Decoration like that has to be just so, or it drives me bats. I need to be able to repaint over it if it doesn't suit me.

Spring-break brings high spirits and the occasional burst of vandalism. Our small neighborhood's mailboxes suffered from a minor outbreak a few nights ago, which inspired me to repaint our mailbox before we re-installed it. Lately I've had an overpowering urge to paint bees; there's one on our front gate, too. This is not a good example of painting on an irregular solid, since the mailbox's shape is so simple, but it is an example of fitting graphics to their context. If I were to be tattooed, I'd agonize for a long time over the design, and finding an artist who could execute it properly.

Here are some I admire.

PS - A neighbor's mailbox disappeared altogether in the outbreak. The next day, the mailman found it in another community a couple of miles away, recognized it just by its number, "23," with no name or street, and brought it back. Small communities are nice.

The Lost Leonardo

National Geographic has a wonderful article on what is believed to be a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting.  It is a beautiful piece, with a sorrowful story.

The Re-programmable Tattoo:

I don't come from a tattooing family.  I'm pretty sure that none of my family has or has ever had a tattoo; not even the WWII veterans, as far as I can recall.  It's just not something we do.

Nevertheless I have to say that this is a pretty cool idea.  Apparently it uses e-ink similar to what you find in a Kindle. One of the reasons to avoid tattoos is that you're stuck with it forever; if it seems like a bad idea in ten years, nevertheless, there it is (barring expensive and painful surgery).  This tattoo, though, you can turn off whenever you want; or you can swap it out for something else.

The Age of Arthur

A military historian blogger I discovered on St. Patrick's Day has begun a series of posts on the historical Arthur.  It's easy reading, and a good general introduction for those of you who are interested in a survey; the author tends to elide over points of historical debate, but that's necessary when writing for a general audience.  The discussion on Arthur tends to get way out in the weeds if you follow the intricate aspects of the debate.  (For those interested in that, you should join ARTHURNET; another excellent but more general resource is this online Arthurian encyclopedia.)

These may also be of interest to those of you who undertook reading the novel I sent out to volunteers a few weeks ago.  The encyclopedia is thorough enough to mention Moren, who before the book appears only in one line of one story, the Welsh Culwhch and Owen.

St. Patrick's Day

In deference to Lars Walker's report from Beyond, let us start with something appropriate.  "St. Patrick's Breastplate" is a famous hymn that survives to us from the Old Irish.

And then something else genuinely Irish:

Can't be anything more Irish than this:

By this point, most Americans will have exhausted their ability to tell the Irish from anything generally Celtic.

'Hey, I think I remember this song is Irish...'

...after which they'll stumble on this one, and be disappointed to realize that it's about an actual brigade.  It's Irish, though!  And American!

(The "Fighting 69th" went on to serve in World War I as part of the "Rainbow Division."  Yes, really.)

Right... so, Australian is kind of Irish, yeah?  And there's bagpipes, which are totally Irish.



What could be more Irish than a song about an Irish ship?

Perhaps even that isn't as wholly Irish as it could be:  here's the greatest of Irish bands singing a song by a Scot named Ewan MacColl.  It's a fine song, all the same.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

"America's Real War On Women"

Peggy Noonan has an excellent column today.  As you know, I refuse to give attention to those who behave in this way, because it is such attention that has generally allowed such people to thrive and to rise to public notice.  These days, notorious and famous are no longer obviously distinct categories:  the coin of the realm is attention.

This should not be surprising.  Some years ago the Defense Science Board -- since we are speaking of these things as a "war" -- conducted a study of military strategic communication.  I take its key findings to be these:

Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource.

Power flows to credible messengers. 

Asymmetrical credibility matters.

The first point is independent; the second two are related.  Attention is the scarce resource:  thus, the speaker who can command attention is the minter of the coin of the realm.

Now take the second and third points together.  What this means is that credible voices are more likely to be powerful and effective, but that what makes someone credible isn't an even game.  In the case of these bad actors, what makes them credible is that they are voicing deeply felt feelings that echo in many people's hearts.  Thus, even when they make the most incredible statements as points of fact, they are asymmetrically quite highly credible.  Thus, insofar as their message gains attention, they will gain power.

The current disruption of Mr. Limbaugh's revenue stream may be an exception to this general rule; but it also may not.  He is quite wealthy enough to survive a temporary disruption of revenue stream, and appears to have settled on a strategy (and a very wise one) of using the opportunity to retrench his financial support among groups who will not be susceptible to future disruptions of this sort.  He is punishing those who abandoned him, and helping those who are willing to stand by him:  this will strengthen his position.  It is the general approach of the USMC, when it advises, "No better friend; no worse enemy."

A strategy to defeat these messengers -- right or left -- must be based around denying them the attention that they command.  Their credibility probably cannot be undermined, because it is not based on the factual accuracy of their remarks.  It is asymmetric credibility.

What is needed is to forward the idea of a general principle of shunning anyone who speaks this way of women.  It needs to be applied even-handedly, but it also needs to avoid the error of demanding that political allies of the speaker condemn their remarks after the fact.  To condemn the remark is to rebroadcast it, which brings it to new attention among those whose hearts agree with it.

For those who happen to be actually present at the time, of course, it is proper to condemn the remarks and the man making them, if he does not apologize and reform himself.  Any gentleman who happens to be present ought to insist upon such an apology with all appropriate force.

The Market is All

A few days ago we had a long conversation about the problems of assuming that markets (and contracts) were good models for handing other social forms (like marriage).  I found this piece from the Atlantic to be an interesting meditation on some of the problems that arise.

The author begins by listing some of the things that are now for sale:

• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.
...
• The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000. Foreigners who invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.

Why not other things?

When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use. 

There are some weak points in the overall argument, and some examples that don't strike me as being a strong as the author suggests.  However, his summation seems quite right to me.

In hopes of avoiding sectarian strife, we often insist that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square. But the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into politics has had an unanticipated consequence....  [Market reasoning] empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy...  

This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today. 

A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. 

This could be seen as anti-conservative, insofar as support for market-based models is a core feature of current conservative thinking.  Or, it could be seen as profoundly conservative, insofar as support for traditional and religious insight into deeper issues of the human condition is a bedrock feature of conservatism.

However we resolve the question of labels for the position, though, the position strikes me as correct.

UPDATE:

A related concern:  when we say that the market decides, what we really mean is that the buyer decides.

For centuries, my predecessors and I have been inculcated with what has come to be called the “Hippocratic Ethic.” This tradition holds that I am ethically required to use the best of my knowledge to recommend to my patient what I consider to be in my patient’s best interests—without regard to the interests of the third-party payer, or the government, or anyone else. 

But gradually the medical profession has been forced to give up this approach for what I like to call a “veterinary ethic,” one that places the interests of the payer (or owner) ahead of the patient. For example, when a pet owner is told by a veterinarian that the pet has a very serious medical condition requiring extremely costly surgery or other therapy, the veterinarian presents the pet’s owner with one or more options—from attempt at cure, to palliation, to euthanasia—with the associated costs, and then follows the wishes of the owner.

A General Principle:

When a man with a long grey beard tells you that he's going to teach you a secret about shotguns that he had from his father, it's always worth taking time to listen to what he has to say.



Via LawDog, who has an interesting story to tell about the history of this approach:  it dates to poachers, African safaris and the British Home Guard.

On The Importance of Picking One's Battles

There may be principled objections to the idea behind the Violence Against Women Act -- for example, the assumption it makes that women need to be under the special protection of the Federal government.  It's clear that Maid Marian benefited from her status as a royal ward, but it's not equally clear that all women ought therefore to aspire to an equivalent status.  Nevertheless, in politics as in war, there are times for digging in and dying in place if necessary; and there are times to recognize that you've been outmaneuvered, and preserve your forces for another day.

In this case, though, the Republicans seem to be doing neither the principled thing nor the smart thing.  This is largely a re-approval of a bill that passed with broad bipartisan support before, so it's not clear that the Republicans do have any strong principle at work as a party here.  This isn't a TEA Party stand against the idea of women as wards of the state; the party leadership is wholly OK with the VAWA, except for a couple of changes in the re-approval.

So, it isn't principle; and as for smarts, those changes (as Mother Jones points out) were made last year.  Good job picking your moment.

Those changes do touch on hot-button issues.  Nevertheless, one of these policies is totally reasonable if you buy the VAWA as a general principle:  while there are very good reasons to oppose the idea that lesbian relationships can constitute a marriage, there are no reasons to oppose the factually obvious reality that they can be violent.  If you believe that VAWA is an appropriate solution to violence against women, then there's no reason it shouldn't hold for lesbian women as for unmarried girlfriends of bad men.

One certainly could oppose the immigration-visa change, but by itself it's not worth the price of the fight.  It would be wiser to let this one go; there will be better ground for re-fighting that issue on another day.

Rules To Waste The Land:

Three little rules today -- two of them from Health and Human Services, a foreshadowing of the increased importance it will take on in every little aspect of your life from now on.

#1:  The first rule has to do with ensuring that abortions are paid for by, well, you.

The Department of Health and Human Services this month issued a final rule regarding the exchanges required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The rule provides for taxpayer funding of insurance coverage that includes elective abortion through a direct abortion subsidy.   

To comply with the accounting requirement, plans will collect a separate $1 abortion surcharge from each premium payer. As described in the rule, the surcharge can only be disclosed to the enrollee at the time of enrollment, and insurance plans may only advertise the total cost of the premiums without disclosing the abortion surcharge.

H/t D29, who also links the actual rule.  My favorite part of it is the part where HHS asked for public comments:

A large number of commenters offered feedback on proposed §156.280... We considered the comments received on this section, and are finalizing the provisions of proposed §156.280 without modification....

Well, naturally.

#2:  'You know what would be really neat?  It'd be neat if we could take your Federal tax dollars, and use them to lobby state and local governments to raise your taxes.  It's like a feedback loop!

'Too bad it appears to be illegal... but that's a temporary problem we will ignore for now.  Perhaps we'll ask some future, compliant Congress to fix the law later... but we may not bother, since we are the ones who decide when to enforce the laws.'

#3:  Remember how, when you were a kid, you used to love to go swimming at the public pool on hot summer days?

On Jan. 31 of this year, DOJ granted the industry's call for a clarification: But it was not the answer they wanted. All 300,000 public pools in the United States must install a permanent fixed lift. The deadline for compliance is tomorrow, March 15....

There is no way all 300,000 pools can install permanent lifts by Thursday. There simply are not enough lifts in existence or enough people who know how to install them, according to industry spokesmen. Plus, each lift costs between $3,000 and $10,000 and installation can add $5,000 to $10,000 to the total. 

So what happens tomorrow when a disabled individual checks into a Holiday Inn and finds no lift at the pool? The Obama DOJ has said it will not be enforcing the new guidelines right away. That means no fines from the government, for now. 

But the ADA also empowered citizens to sue businesses that are not in compliance with DOJ guidelines. The result will be a huge payday for enterprising trial lawyers everywhere.

Officially, the Constitution empowers Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.  Maybe we're now issuing them to trial lawyers, for use against American citizens.

Home Work

If you'd like to see how my friend's home-schooled young son is coming along on that great big piano I posted about a while back, here he is playing Chopin's Prelude No. 17 in A-flat major and looking very grown-up in his grandfather's tie. If he can't pick up girls with this kind of performance, he's not half trying.

Fiber-minded women gathered at my friend's house today from all over Texas. The house and various outbuildings are fairly stuffed from one end to the other with spinning wheels and looms, at least ten of each. It's like something out of Hansel and Gretel: everywhere you look there are skeins of homespun hand-dyed yarn, home-woven rugs, drawings, paintings, and carvings. Outside there are cisterns, barns, chickens, bathtubs full of Louisiana irises and lily pads, handmade concrete paving stones set with old pieces of china or license plates, fruit trees, vegetable patches, roses, wildflowers, and a lot of cats and dogs.

We dyed some cotton, wool, and silk fibers and fabrics with indigo. One of our company tried to figure out how to make an old fiber-carding machine work that someone had found. The newbies among us practiced spinning; I discovered the problem I was having on my own wheel (aside from the difficulty in keeping the newest dog from eating it) is that the treadle doesn't function smoothly. Having used my friend's better wheel, I'm inspired to fiddle with mine and improve it. I'm not quite ready to bring a loom into my home, though, a fact that should comfort my husband.

Revolution and Generation

A rather dire warning from a woman who was once an Iranian judge... until the revolution of 1979, after which she found herself promoted to "secretary."

There's no doubt that the Arab Spring movements have much to concern us.  There's also no doubt that, when the existing social contract expires, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," as Mao Zedong rather rightly noted.

What that means is that we have to sort out who is going to have the guns and convince them that female political power is in their interests.  How to do that?  If it cannot be done, then there will be no rights for women in these societies for a long time to come -- until the new "social treaty" stabilizes, enough for a gentler kind of evolution of thought to take place.  That is the kind of thing that takes generations, not revolutions:  think how many generations were needed here.

Tone Deaf

Let's say that you're outraged by the position of Jesuit universities such as Georgetown with regard to access to birth control.  You'd like to convey the severity of your feelings on the subject to Catholic no-goodsters.

Could you come up with a worse way to try to be impressive than by announcing "a week-long exercise in self-denial"... in the middle of the Lent?

The Offense of Dante

Having seen the destruction of one Medieval masterpiece this week, a self-described "human rights" organization is advocating that we should go for two.  The NGO, Gherush92, explained that Dante's Divine Comedy is -- well, the scope of their complaint embraces every modern heresy.  It's everything that good-hearted people should hate.

Via Media comments that they have a few more suggestions for books that should not be presented to school-age children:

The Bible. This deeply problematic tome has incited full-fledged religious wars and been used to justify slavery, anti-semitism, homophobia and countless other injustices. It should be banned posthaste, along with any works which make reference to its contents, such as Paradise Lost, Dr. Faustus and the collected writings of Martin Luther King Jr.

Pride and Prejudice. Far from being a harmless romantic tale, Jane Austen’s novel is an offensively heteronormative work that implicitly privileges the so-called traditional family and marriage over alternative social arrangements. (We recommend substituting the morally superior Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on your syllabi.)

To Kill A Mockingbird. Promotes cruelty to animals.

The Qur’an. Rejects other religions as inferior. Frequently misread by a small but rambunctious minority of readers as a call to wage holy war on modernity and various national landmarks. Has something against pork, threatening livelihoods of many innocent farmers.

No Country for Old Men. Ageism.

Sherlock Holmes. While ostensibly centering around the exploits of the sleuth of Baker Street, this sinister series in fact promulgates anti-Mormon and anti-Jewish bigotry along the way. Case closed. Permanently.

The map of the cosmology, which can be enlarged, was drawn in the 19th century by an Italian scholar and man of letters named Michelangelo Caetani di Sermoneta.  It shows one of the ways in which the Comedy is helpful to students:  it graphically illustrates the Western worldview's dual debt to ancient Greece and the religious tradition.  Plato takes the (apparently eternal) circular movement of the heavens to be evidence of a semi-divine attempt to replicate the unchanging perfection of the Forms.  The "sphere of fixed stars" and the other celestial spheres were a feature of Greek astronomy that was important especially to Aristotle's physics and metaphysics; its central place in Dante's view of reality was shared not only by Christian thinkers like Aquinas, but by Jewish ones like Maimonides and Gersonides, and Islamic thinkers -- especially Avicenna, who made those spheres the mechanism of God's creation and providence.

Every one of these thinkers is subject to the same complaint as Dante:  each of them is entirely certain of the truth of their faith, and the inferiority of others.  Maimonides' writings, when they touch on race as such, are at least as racist as anything Dante imagined; Avicenna's writings on women will be shockingly offensive to everyone outside of the Islamic world today.

Nevertheless, the student will learn more from any one of these thinkers than from the whole corpus produced by "human rights organizations" working today.  Take what you want from them, and leave what you don't; but if you were to make a list of the thousand greatest minds in history, few of these names would be absent from it.  A guide who provides as useful an introduction to this rich landscape as Dante is invaluable.

The student, in any case, must be trained early to be courageous in the encounter with new ideas, and capable of sorting the good from the bad.  That particular talent, I believe, is called "discrimination."

The Burning of Krásna Hôrka:

Krásna Hôrka, a thirteenth century castle in Slovakia, burned this week due to children playing with matches inside of it.  It is a great tragedy, and a rare opportunity to see the danger that fire posed to medieval fortifications.

The towering flames had now surmounted every obstruction, and rose to the evening skies one huge and burning beacon, seen far and wide through the adjacent country. Tower after tower crashed down, with blazing roof and rafter; and the combatants were driven from the court-yard. The vanquished, of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighbouring wood. The victors, assembling in large bands, gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, upon the flames, in which their own ranks and arms glanced dusky red. 

-Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

Yet fire was not only a siege weapon but a daily tool in such castles:  the main form of heat, and the only form of light beyond the sky.

(Via Medievalists.net, which has far more video from the story.)

"Errant"

High, the painful mountains,

Covered with thorny blue pine.

Mists rise from falls like fountains;

Under trees, with outstretched spine,

The sharp spires of fallen cones

Lie atop grey and aged stones.

In the smoke there shapes a girl

Or else in dreams I have with me;

In the darkening I watch her curl,

The helmet propping up my knee.

Too dark to read, with whitened blade,

I carve a staff in living glade.

Come morning I shall go, and ride

The wildr'ness ridge for distant miles;

Below, the wood is green and wide,

Above, geese sway in arching files;

I ride till trees prick sun with lance:

There in smoke my dream will dance.

Sometimes I dream she calls to me,

And reaches out to stroke my face

In that hot white city beside the sea;

But morning wakes upon the waste.

I rise up from my bed of stone,

Take up my boots, and ride alone.

Grasping the Nettle

I thought I'd touched nettles before, but this is a new one on me. Twenty-four hours later, I still felt as though I had electrodes hooked up to my fingers.

Wikipedia tells me that the stem of the Urtica dioica bears short and long hairs. The long hairs are little needles that inject acetylcholine, histamine, 5-HT (serotonin), moroidin, leukotrienes, and possibly formic acid. (My nettle sting did feel a bit like an ant-bite at first.)

"Urtication" is the process of flogging with nettles. It's not done only to torment; it is considered a folk remedy for rheumatism. Similarly, a beekeeper of my acquaintance reports that it is common knowledge among his colleagues that beekeepers have no autoimmune diseases, a fact they attribute to being routinely stung in the course of their duties. I have heard reports of people cured of crippling arthritis after a dangerous bout with multiple bee stings. So maybe I should be out there grasping nettles, or annoying bees, but I think I'll pass.

Nettles lose their sting upon being cooked, and are said to taste like spinach. Late in their season, however, they produce a gritty molecule that can irritate the urinary tract, so harvest them young. They are used to flavor some cheeses, such as Yarg and Gouda. Their stems produce a fiber somewhat like linen, but coarser. Their roots produce a useful yellow dye. Their presence indicates highly fertile soil, and they are excellent sources of nitrogen for compost. They are one of the few plants that can tolerate and even flourish in soils rich in poultry droppings. We certainly have those. Major chicken-poop operation going on here, though I must say that the nettles were growing quite a distance from the chicken coops.

It's been about 27 hours, and now the effect is finally wearing off.

Just Live It Right the First Time

H/t Maggie's Farm, part of a quotation from the 17th-18th-century Shawnee leader Tecumseh as rendered in the recent movie, "Act of Valor":

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.

The Girl, Getting Bigger:

You all remember my little girl Avalon, right?  She'll be two this spring.

The Emotional Oracle

More links from Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Your brain knows more than you think. Your gut won't give you a good answer about a complex situation you're completely ignorant of, but it may give you an excellent result if you've been exposed to a lot of facts that you haven't yet had a chance to sort through rationally and systematically. Experimenters found that subjects could make very good seat-of-the-pants guesses about complex systems like the stock market, sports tournaments, and weather, after they'd had a mass of uncoordinated data shoved at them on each subject. This result is consistent with something I was reading recently about successful techniques for "cramming" for quiz shows, and with my own experience in picking crossword solutions out of what sometimes seems like thin air. I suppose it's also related to what allows great athletes to do the impossible, or even what makes typing or playing the piano possible without tripping over one's own feet like the proverbial self-conscious centipede.

I wonder if people would do better or worse at this trick after the electro-treatment I mentioned in my last post?

All Quiet in the Head

A nagging millstone, or the "still, small voice"? A mild electro-therapy to the brain is said to quiet the internal cacophony and permit its subjects to learn new tasks with greater ease. It sounds like a way to get catapulted right into The Zone. The author reports that the effect lasted for about three days, and that she missed it like crazy when it wore off. If the device were commercially available, she'd "wear one at all times and have two in my backpack ready in case something happened to the first one." But she wonders whether we would be better or worse people without the nagging doubts that we so often hear in our minds.

Art Against War

The New Criterion has an article called "The New Old Lie," which treats the current demand that war always be treated as essentially meaningless.

The latter view, Schwarz has written, “that combat, even combat that defeats Nazi Germany, is without uplift, without virtue, and without purpose” is “unusually clear-eyed” about “real war.” This belief has been overlooked by a population that wants to be coddled and so refuses to recognize that true artistry goes hand in hand with, as Schwarz would have it, the accurate, nihilistic view of war. 

This conceit has long been de rigueur among professional critics of high culture. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson equated human war to the aggression of gangs of baboons and sea slugs: “at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.”... 

Over the past half century, scarcely an American student has studied Great War poetry without finding out that Wilfred Owen produced the greatest poem of the war. With its horrifying depictions of the suffering and death of fighting in the trenches, his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” proved “the old lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Tellingly, we would be hard-pressed to find a student these days who has read “Dulce et Decorum Est” in its original form by Horace. After all, the Roman poet could not possibly have produced art if it contained such sentimental pap.

We've spoken of that poem before. "The divide in our nation is between those who feel that the words are "the Old Lie," and those who engrave them in stone."

Why PUA Techniques Don't Work:

xkcd has it nailed.

You can't beat this without hitting bottom.  And once you've hit bottom, you're not looking down on other people:  you're looking up.



I think of the scene from "Fight Club" where Tyler Durden forces the Asian guy, at gunpoint, to return to his studies.  It's at that moment, facing death as a failure, that you realize that anything would be better than this.



And so, you're looking up.  As long as they're fighting, they're fighting for something better.  God save them, and us.

Happy Lent.  Mine has been a failure so far:  and that means it has been a success.  Lent, taken seriously, is also about hitting bottom.  It lets you know that you ought to love the man who is your enemy, because a man like you deserves an enemy.  The man you ought to hate is the man who will accommodate you as you are.

A Song for Spring

The spring is upon us.  And so, a song:



It has a name that honors the generation before the one currently fecund; but without them, how would we have the new?

UPDATE:  As to which, our brothers at BSBFB say...

[W]hat's the difference between bagpipes and an onion? No one cries when you chop up a bagpipe. What's the difference between a bagpipe and a trampoline? You take your shoes off to jump up and down on a trampoline...

Thanks, guys.  We almost appreciate it.