A Photo from the Road

I have some internet access this afternoon.  It's been quite a trip, what with the unexpected storms all across the Carolinas.  I'll have more for you this weekend, but for now, just one photo.

Hopefully, your travel plans for today include Carnesville.

The Garden of Eden

In case you've ever wondered what your garden could look like if you had 7 million tulip bulbs and ten months of the year to devote to one eye-popping 60-day show every spring.

Holy Week

Holy Week: when, as Grim reminds us below, we remember how God faced down Death.

. . . Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them ?
What love was ever as deep as a grave ?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

. . .

Here death may deal not again for ever;

Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

From "A Forsaken Garden," Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909

Wind in Real Time

Here's a site I'll be returning to often. If you look right now, you'll see it looks as though someone pulled a drain plug in North Dakota. I'll be looking forward to viewing the site the next time we have a really good nor'easter or hurricane.

H/t Rocket Science.

Out of the Wilderness and into the Wild

I will be gone to the Wild for a week, from Palm to Easter Sunday.  I will be traveling the Blue Ridge from the Nantahala to the George Washington forests, and camping for a night or two in the Shenandoah national park.  Mostly, though, I will keep to the forests.

On the subject of which, I have been reading a very interesting book:  Corinne J. Saunders' The Forest of Medieval Romance:  Avernus, Broceliande, Arden.  Dr. Saunders is comfortable in English from Old to Middle to Modern, as well as several forms of medieval French and Latin.  As such she has created a wonderful book on how the forest was portrayed in the period's literature, but with an introductory chapter on the sources for Medieval conceptions of the forest.

She argues there are three sources that get run together in the romantic literature:  the legal status of the forest in the Germanic and post-Roman world; the Biblical desert or wilderness, which was a place for training for purity as well as for seeking God; and a neoplatonic thread that tended to think of the forest (silva) in the way that the ancient Greeks had thought of the wood (hyle).

We have talked about the basic conflict between the form, or order, that Christianity assigns to God (logos); against that, in Plato's Timeaus and in the neoplatonic tradition, which includes many Christian thinkers, is the underlying chaos that God is forming ("And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.").  In the romance, this plays out in the forest:  the town, like the garden, is the place where men have helped to bring order to the primal chaos of nature.  The forest is the home of outlaws, bandit knights, wild beasts, and demons:

There the monk encounters the demon, an encounter that it must be said is inevitable, for the demon is at home in the desert. (Saunders, 15)

It is also the home of the faerie, whose name properly means Fates, who for the ancients are the true powers of this world.  These are the things that, as Tex's source reminds us, the Saxons expected even God to have to answer:  and the glory of Christ, over Woden, was in conquering.

Christ tells his followers to not resist, but in the Saxon version it is because he must undergo ‘the workings of fate’, the ultimate determinant of reality to the pagan Germanic peoples. When he is crucified, the cross is interpreted as a tree or gallows, which would have seemed similar to the hanging of Woden in the cosmic tree when he tried to learn the riddle of death and discovered the mysterious runes...  

Once resurrected, the warrior Christ becomes greater than Woden having escaped his own fated death with his own power and ascending to the right hand of God; the old Gods have been replaced by the Saxon saviour.

If it pleases the fates, I shall return to you on Easter.  I bid you a good week.

A New Approach to Movies?

It would be nice if we could find an alternative to the Hollywood system that keeps turning out these pieces of dross.  Amazon has apparently decided on an approach whereby they will storyboard movies and then put them up for customers to view.

This one appears to be a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Crimson Skies.  You can watch it, and then go to their studio website to let them know if you'd go and see such a film in the theater -- should they invest in producing it.

Hey, Looks Like They're Remaking "Snow White"...

I wonder how that will go?

The dwarfs... teach the princess to believe in herself in a Rocky-esque training montage of swordplay and thuggery. When Snow must face the Queen in the dark woods for their ultimate battle sequence, she says to Prince Alcott, a handsome nothing played by Armie Hammer (a Romney son would have worked just as well), "I've read so many stories where the prince saves the princess. I think it's time we change that ending. This is my fight."

How unexpected.  I'm sure audiences will be stunned.

MMA Ancient-Style

Pankration was such a bloody sport that it had only two known rules: no eye-gouging and no biting. Aside from these restrictions, anything was fair game. Philostratos, an ancient writer who lived around the same time as Flavillianus, wrote that pankration competitors are skillful in different types of strangulation. "They bend ankles and twist arms and throw punches and jump on their opponents," (Translation from the book "Arete: Greek sports from ancient sources," Stephen Gaylord Miller, 2004).

Apparently one of the champions was such a successful military recruiter for Rome that, after he died, they created a place for him in the cult of the Band of Heroes.

Thass a lotta words just to say "Never Mind"

Apropos of our recent discussion on impenetrable scientific writing, this disguised admission from the IPCC's most recent Special Report on Extremes:

FAQ 3.1 Is the Climate Becoming More Extreme? . . . None of the above instruments has yet been developed sufficiently as to allow us to confidently answer the question posed here. Thus we are restricted to questions about whether specific extremes are becoming more or less common, and our confidence in the answers to such questions, including the direction and magnitude of changes in specific extremes, depends on the type of extreme, as well as on the region and season, linked with the level of understanding of the underlying processes and the reliability of their simulation in models. . . .

There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change . . . . The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados . . . . The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses.

Which pretty much amounts to: "Actually, as it turns out, we have no clue." So much for Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change Whatever.

H/t Watt's up with That.

And by the way, Perry kicks the EPA's butt in Texas. The EPA had the same reaction as the IPCC to the pointed question from the EPA, "What's your legal authority?" Response: Your Honor, we got nuthin.

Goodnight, Mr. Scruggs:

Today marks the passage, at the fine age of eighty-eight, of bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs.  Here is an old documentary film about himself and his family.  It's also a rather amusing period piece in which the hippie narrator attempts to celebrate the "radical change" coming over the documentary's subject.  In fact, it was more of a detour -- and why not?  Pioneers are explorers by nature, even if at last they come home.



We were lucky to live in the right time to hear him play.

The Georgia Botanical Garden

Yesterday we rode over to the gardens, which lie just by the middle fork of the Oconee River.  Owned by the state of Georgia, it operates under the guidance of the University of Georgia, one of three claimants to the title of oldest public college in America.  It is a large facility, looped by a five mile trail that runs along the river for some distance.  There are numerous facilities and classes, including in related fields like beekeeping.  Many types of plants and, indeed, many types of gardens are featured.  I'm going to show you a few of the earlier types.

 The Herb Garden

Medieval gardens were enclosed and patterned, devoted to herbs and other useful plants.  The forest were frightening and wild:  even before the regulation of forests, they were tied to human communities by the swine who sheltered in them, by the hunter, and by outlaws.  The garden a place of order, where the goods of nature were perfected by human reason.

The Physic Garden

The herbs grown by the Medievals often had medicinal value.  In London in 1673, the Worshipful Society of Apothicaries founded a "physic garden" to provide adequate supplies of rare herbs and plants to study in the quest to improve human health.  The University of Georgia maintains this one in a knotwork pattern.

Courtyard

There is a small amount of formal statuary at the garden, including this fountain.  Several archways, most draped with wisteria, provide shade in the summer.

Amphitheater

The Amphitheater is a newer addition -- you can see that the apple trees are still little more than twigs, perhaps two or three years old.  In a few years they will provide food and shade for people who come to witness outdoor plays, in a way that ties this garden to the ancient Athens for which the University's home takes its name.

Inflation

A gram of silver is currently worth about a dollar.  Thus a silver coin weighing about one and a half grams is worth about a buck and a half.

Unless it was minted by Charlemagne for his coronation, in which case it is apparently worth €160,000.  That is $213,072 at what Google is giving as the current rates.

I expect it would be hard to make change.

(H/t: Medieval News).

A Better Approach to Legislation

Justice Ginsburg today made some remarks suggesting that Congress would be unfairly treated if the entirety of the health-care law should be overturned:

Mr. Clement, there are so many things in this Act that are unquestionably okay. I think you would concede that reauthorizing what is the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act changes to long benefits, why make Congress redo those? I mean it's a question of whether we say everything you do is no good, now start from scratch, or to say, yes, there are many things in here that have nothing to do frankly with the affordable healthcare and there are some that we think it's better to let Congress to decide whether it wants them in or out.  So why should we say it's a choice between a wrecking operation, which is what you are requesting, or a salvage job.

You know what would prevent Congress from being in this position in the future?  Passing discrete laws to deal with particular problems, instead of 2,700 page boilermakers that they don't even have time to read before they pass.

It would be healthy for Congress to have to go back and re-pass every good part of the bill, insofar as there are any.  For the Court to undertake to do the work of sorting this out for them is to present Congress with a kind of moral hazard:  it will make it less likely in the future that the legislature will exercise diligence in reading or considering the legislation it passes, and it will make it more likely they will continue to lump thousands of legal changes together instead of carefully considering each law as it comes up.  The American people must live under these laws, after all:  it is therefore important that no law should ever be passed without due care and consideration.

Neither this Congress nor any recent Congress has demonstrated a great deal of fortitude in the face of moral hazards.  This ought to be a consideration.

Text Anxiety

Maybe this is what's wrong with the Test.

Am I allowed to say "wrong"? Or "anxiety"?

Fighting below Krac des Chevaliers

The most famous Crusader castle in the world is the scene of current fighting in the Syrian counterinsurgency.  It was known in its day as Crac de l'Ospital, after the Knights Hospitaller who inhabited and defended its walls.  The Knights defended it valiantly until 1271, when it was captured after a brutal siege that ended with a forged letter pretending to be orders from the Grand Master to surrender the place.  The Sultan who issued the forgery honored the terms of it, though, and allowed the surviving Knights to withdraw in good order.



Medievalists.net has more details.

It lost a bit in translation

In the early 9th century, Charlemagne's missionaries translated the Gospels into Old Saxon in order to aid the conversion of their conquered enemies. Luke's description of Christ's arrest near Gethsemane is rendered under the title of "Christ the chieftain is captured, Peter the mighty soldier defends him boldly."

Christ’s warrior companions saw warriors coming up the mountain making a great din
Angry armed men. Judas the hate filled man was showing them the way.
The enemy clan, the Jews, were marching behind.
The warriors marched forward, the grim Jewish army, until they had come to the Christ.
There he stood, the famous chieftain.
Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action
Held their position in front.
They spoke to their chieftain, ‘My Lord chieftain’, they said, ‘if it should now
Be your will that we be impaled here under spear points
Wounded by their weapons then nothing would be so good to us as to die here
Pale from mortal wounds for our chieftain’.

Then he got really angry
Simon Peter, the mighty, noble swordman flew into a rage.

His mind was in such turmoil he could not speak a single word.
His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there.
So he strode over angrily, that very daring Thane, to stand in front of his commander
Right in front of his Lord.

No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest he drew his blade
And struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands
So that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword.
His ear was chopped off.
He was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with the mortal wound
Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound.
The men stood back; they were afraid of the slash of the sword.

Which is about how Hollywood would stage it now, I suspect, except that they'd probably put the sword in Mary Magdalene's hand.

Honky Tonk Angels, and Other Glories

How about a little rockabilly this morning?





This next band appears to be Belgian, to judge from what I've been able to dig up on them, but they seem to have the spirit more or less right.  That doesn't always happen when Europeans try on American mythology.

Cheaper Than Water

I love articles that have a good appreciation for the history of a problem -- although, perhaps "problem" is too strong:

For well over a thousand years now, we’ve had a problem with “the vice of drunkenness”.  “Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,” as the writer GK ­Chesterton put it.  As far back as 1362, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: “The tavern is worshipped rather than the church, gluttony and drunkenness is more abundant than tears and prayers.”

...[currently supermarkets] sell cider cheaper than water.

Cheaper than water?  That was true of the beer in China when we were there.  Bottled water was quite expensive, whereas the local brew was very nearly free:  I think I worked out that it cost something like eight cents a quart.

It sounds as though earlier policies aimed at this problem have been successful.  As the article notes, in the 19th century the problem was hard liquor, especially gin.  Wise Victorians decided that they needed to make lighter drinks like wine and beer -- and cider -- cheaper and more easily available.  Thus, they passed laws that resulted in the opening of tens of thousands of beer halls.

The author agrees, finally, that this is the right road to taming the problem today:  "We need to get people back into the British boozer and not getting sozzled at home on supermarket deals."

That sounds like a well-formulated policy.  It's also important to keep things in perspective.  Since we cited an archbishop in 1362, why not consider a more famous sermon from an earlier English archbishop?

Sword-Fighting Restaurant Owner Defeats Robber

What I really like about this story is that it makes no attempt to explain why there was a sword around.  Why would it be newsworthy to find a sword in the restaurant?

The other thing about it is the sidebar listing similar stories of sword attacks.  There are a dozen of them from Florida alone.

Via FARK (of course).

No Taxation?

I share something of Dr. Althouse's bemusement at the government's arguments as presented today.  Is the penalty associated with failure to maintain insurance at HHS-approved levels a tax, or is it not a tax?  The answer appears to be both "Yes," and also "No."

The old law refers to things designated a "tax," but Congress chose not to call the penalty a "tax." To call it a tax would have further inflamed the political opposition to the health care bill. Now that the bill has passed, however, we can coolly examine what it really is, and what it really is is what counts when the question is whether Congress has an enumerated constitutional power. It really is a tax, so it's within Congress's power to tax. That's the argument.

It's not much of an argument, though, because the "old law" is still relevant. Thus, it won't do to say that this wasn't a tax by 1867's standards, but it is by today's. We have to say that right now it is not a tax, because if it were that would create negative consequences for the government's desire to resolve this issue now; and that also, right now, it is a tax because otherwise Congress has no authority to do it.

One thing that I find odd is that the administration doesn't want to take the out -- apparently they argued earlier that this was a tax (full stop), and thus that the 1867 law prevented any lawsuits until someone had paid the tax.  That would put the issue off until 2015, when presumably every insurance company in America will be well on its way to going out of business because of the costs associated with compliance.  By 2015, in other words, the law won't be subject to being overturned in the same way, because the private health-insurance market will have been crippled.  You'll be well on your way to something like single payer.

So what's the deal?  Is this a calculation by the President that he won't be re-elected, and thus putting off the court ruling a year or two is not a good idea?  An expected conservative shift in the court's composition seems like the only thing I can think of that is strong enough to shift the balance on the above calculation.  That's a not a show of confidence by the administration as to its chances for re-election.

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.