Haidt's Surveys

Dr. Jonathan Haidt has a new book out, which Cassandra has recommended to me highly -- I have not had time as yet! -- and which is beginning to make ripples in the community.  You may have seen the Hot Air piece on how conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives; or the New York magazine piece with the amusing illustrations that was featured on the always-interesting Arts & Letters Daily.

Dr. Haidt has updated his online quizzes, which you may enjoy taking for fun or edification; or just to help see the point he's trying to make.  I was pleased to score perfectly on the scientific knowledge quiz, for example; it's not hard, and I expect all of you will do likewise.  Both liberals and conservatives average over six out of seven total points.

The point he is making that gets the most attention comes from his "Sacredness Survey," where he's pushing the argument that conservatives and liberals share three value systems (fairness, avoidance of harm, and purity), but that conservatives have two more (authority and in-group loyalty).

I learn from this survey that Haidt's model ranks me as considering all but one of these values considerably more sacred than is normal for either liberals or conservatives; the exception is authority, for which I apparently have almost no respect whatsoever.

That helps me to understand Dr. Haidt's point, but it shows me that he doesn't quite understand my way of thinking about things.  I have a great deal of respect for legitimate authority; but I run it in with in-group loyalty. That is to say, my view of legitimate authority is that it arises from a mutual and reciprocal bond of loyalty.  Lacking such a bond, there is no legitimate authority.  This is because authority must be earned and deserved.

You'll find the surveys interesting, and perhaps illuminating.  I also have it on good authority that Cassandra will be writing about this book soon, so you'll get a head start on your homework!

Speaking of cognitive dissonance

My sister, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, had a coffee cup made for her husband, bearing a slogan she admires: "Never talk to your government without a lawyer." Her husband is a lawyer, as of course am I. She had just finished mentioning to me that I'd have a chance to meet a friend of hers at my niece's upcoming wedding, and that I would like her: she's a lawyer, but the "good kind." (No trace of irony or self-awareness.) She also seems blissfully unaware of the irony of her mug, given her otherwise unbounded enthusiasm for looking to government for solutions to everything. I might have observed that I wasn't looking forward to having to bring my lawyer to my medical appointments in decades to come.

But I don't see any reason to turn every single conversation with my sister into a pitched political battle, so I contented myself with repeating to her one of my favorite old jokes:

I come from a mixed household: my mother was Catholic, my father Jewish. So I went to confession, but I brought a lawyer. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
-- I believe you know Mr. Cohen."

Housemoms: the new "bling"

"Luxury" is a word that contains a slew of moral assumptions. The usual definition involves something that goes beyond necessity and pertains to sumptuous living. It shouldn't surprise us that people living in different circumstances would vary sharply in their estimates of what was necessary and what was luxurious: to a man with a bus pass, a Honda Civic seems almost as luxurious as a Rolls Royce.

A definition of luxury becomes even more fraught with unconscious moral assumptions when the term is applied to activities that at one time were considered duties. You hear people talk, for instance, as though the prohibition against theft were a luxury that only the rich can afford, because they are not truly hungry. A more thoughtful way to apprpoach that issue would be to say that a rich man's honesty has not been tested by hunger, with a cautionary note that a rich man should be slow to assume that he would do a better job than his neighbor of avoiding theft if he ever were equally hungry. By defining a virtue as a luxury, however, someone who wants to remove the stigma from violation of a duty can score an indirect moral point in his own favor, or at least disarm his critics in advance -- as if everyone in less desperate straits than oneself were at least unpleasantly complacent, if not outright greedy.

I am referring, obviously, to the President's recent statement that he and his wife did not have the "luxury" of letting her stay home with the kids. This statement is remarkably full of loaded assumptions. To begin with, it's hard not to laugh at the idea that a family with hundreds of thousands of dollars of income "can't afford" to forgo a second paycheck. But even if you buy that notion, calling a stay-at-home mom a "luxury" is essentially to make a judgment that the big house and the cable TV are basic necessities, while personally raising their children constitutes the frill.

The President presumably considers himself something of a feminist, without ever thinking about it very hard. Being a man of his culture, however, he naturally assumes that the man works and then, if there's still not enough money, the woman works too, which just shows you that he's not nutty enough to expect even a very liberal electorate to swallow too many transformative social experiments all at once. But a real feminist wouldn't justify her decision to earn a living by saying her husband couldn't afford to support her. She might suggest that, if it were clear that at least one parent ought to stay home with young children, then some careful thought should be given to which parent it should be. She might also take the position that it's no one's business but hers and her husband's how they arrange to share the adult duties in their household.

In the meantime, luxury strikes me as a word connoting envy. Ann Romney, understandably, is the target of a lot of envy, who is being asked to justify her good fortune and is being rather casually reviled for it.

Update: Over at her place, Cassandra has summed up nicely part of what I was trying to say. Ann Romney takes heat for staying at home. Sarah Palin takes heat for failing to do so.

The one constant in all of this agonizing over a woman's proper role has been that if the woman happens to be a liberal, there is no wrong answer. But if she's conservative, there is no right answer. . . . [S]ome folks on the right are just as deeply confusicated about all this pesky talk of women having dangerous choices as their progressive brethren in Christ.

There's always someone out there ready to explain to us females how our choices aren't quite up to snuff, on one side of the political aisle or the other, and how we need to let someone else circumscribe them for us, lest we stray into danger or make unfair inroads into someone else's turf. As far as I'm concerned, if adults can establish households in which the bills get paid one way or another without reliance on violence, fraud, or handouts, and any kids under their roof are free from abusive neglect, everyone else can butt out.

What of the Grand Jury?

We've only talked about the Martin/Zimmerman case once before here at the Hall, but the one time we did we seemed to agree that the facts suggested a grand jury.  Instead, Florida has decided to proceed with charges without the trouble of empanelling such a jury.  I would like to put the question of the grand jury to our resident lawyers.  I realize that Florida law doesn't require one in non-capital cases, and apparently this prosecutor generally doesn't use them except in capital cases.

Still, this seems like a case in which a grand jury would have been especially appropriate.  The grand jury dates to Henry II's reforms, and its guarantee was demanded of King John in Magna Carta.  It is a panel whose special purpose is to ensure that a jury of peers agrees that charges are appropriate, which seems especially to be proper in cases where there is tremendous political pressure on the government to find a way to bring charges against someone.

Thus the Fifth Amendment says:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury....

...except in certain cases pertaining to actual military service.  Florida is standing on the fact that this is not a capital case, but it surely meets the standard of a charge of an "infamous crime."  The level of publicity, and attending political pressures, seem to make this exactly the kind of case in which a grand jury would be most appropriate.

I'm sure there is a legal tradition of interpreting "infamous crime" of which I am unaware; but I'd like to ask you for the benefit of your education and experience in these matters.

Sic Transit Santorum

We are unfortunate even as he is fortunate.  He learned that he didn't want the power so much as he wanted the things he had looked for power to protect.  That is great wisdom:  but how strange to find it in a candidate for the presidency.  

Daddy Was A Godfearing Man, Whose Father Shot the Chief of Police

I meant to post this at Easter, but forgot for one reason and another.  It ties many things together we have spoken of lately.



The story is familiar; my great-great grandfather is supposed to have killed a sheriff and several deputies in the factional guerrilla fighting that came after the Civil War.  I have no reason to doubt the story; in fact, I have the musket, whose lock is the right age, and whose stock was hand-cut.

Flowers and Fire

Since Tex is showing us a lot of flowers lately, perhaps you'd like to see our Easter-blooming roses.

Some of you may find your eyes drawn to the fire that is going on in the background of that photo.  Here's a closeup of that for those of you who prefer fire and iron.

Easter lilies

Lilium longiflorum is a native of the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan. Beginning in the late 1800s, the bulb was cultivated in Bermuda and then shipped to the United States. American production of the Easter lily began when an Oregon soldier named Louis Houghton returned home from World War I with some of the bulbs and shared them with fellow gardeners.

When World War II began and Asian sources of the bulbs were cut off, suddenly imported Easter lilies became scarce and expensive. American lily nursery production began in earnest, and the bulbs were known as “white gold” to growers attempting to make a profit. By 1945, 1,200 lily growers were in business up and down the west coast. Today the market is dominated by a handful of growers located on the the Oregon-California border in an approximately 12-mile-long strip of land along the Pacific coast, called the "Easter Lily Capital of the World."

I think that explains why they're never more than moderately happy when we plant them here. They probably want it to be in the 60s all the time. They couldn't ask for a nicer day than today, though.

H/t Dave's Garden, which produces a nice email newsletter you can sign up for, free of charge.

Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, alleluia

Our choir director delighted me this morning by choosing this lovely Taizé chant for the Easter service:



Am, E, Am, G

C, G, Am, E

Am, E, Am, G

C, G, Am/E, Am

Louez le Seigneur, tous les peuples!
Fêtez-le tous les pays, Alléluia!
Son amour envers nous s'est montré le plus fort,
Eternelle est sa fidélité, Alléluia!
Dieu monte parmi l'acclamation,
Le Seigneur aux éclats du cor.
Sonnez pour notre Dieu, sonnez,
Sonnez pour notre Roi, sonnez!
Acclamez, acclamez Dieu toute la terre,
Chantez à la gloire de son nom, en disant:
"Toute la terre se prosterne devant toi,
Elle chante pour toi, elle chante pour ton nom."

I heard about the Taizé community and its music only the other day over at Maggie's Farm. Brother Roger, who in 1940 founded this international ecumenical community of monks based in Burgundy, France, was murdered seven years ago at the age of 90, during evening prayers. Though a Protestant, Fr. Roger sought reconciliation with the Catholic Church and was granted some limited license to accept Catholic communion in violation of the usual rule excluding Protestants. He was stabbed to death by a 36-year-old woman.

Here is our Easter Altar, which had been stripped and left bare from Good Friday through the Easter vigil. As is our custom, the children in the congregation "flowered the cross" during the service. We had two baptisms this morning, a rarity in our elderly congregation. The tiny church was overflowing with 200 people.

Lent feels like passing through a tunnel that gets narrower and narrower, until it is with a tangible relief that we restore the "Alleluia" to our service.

And tonight, wine with Easter dinner. Lent is over.

Resurrection

He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man. You would like, if you could, to interpret the patient's prostration in the Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes, Wormwood, a clearer knowledge even than yours) on the analogy of your own choking and paralysing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of Heaven. But it's all nonsense. Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Truth is Stonger than Lies

Life is stronger than death. Good is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Truth is stronger than lies.

The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil.

That does, indeed, seem to be the challenge of the era. Notice, though, that 'something can come from nothing' only if we dramatically change the meaning of the word "nothing."  "Nothing" now means something, something like 'the potential for the creation of a universe.'  And that, as it happens, is nothing other than the orthodox position:  the universe came from that which had the potential to create it.

What kind of thing is that?  To say that it is "nothing" is merely to give it a new name:  but it is the same thing, whatever name you call it by.

Meditation on Some Things that Need Forgiving

In honor of the recent trip through the Deep South, some Southern thoughts on the sins that Easter forgives:

John Derbyshire and Racism

For a long time, when this blog was younger -- it's nine years old now -- we had a link section called "Admired Voices."  William Raspberry was one of them; he's been retired now for several years.  John Derbyshire was another.  What I admired about him was that he was never dissembled even a bit about what he thought, whatever the consequences.

I see that Derbyshire's latest piece got him fired from National Review.  Well, National Review has been run by cowards for a while now.  Still, there is one part in particular that really deserves condemnation:

In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

That's a hell of a thing to say to any man who was your friend -- or rather, who ever thought he was.  If Derbyshire is advocating such deception -- toward a man you'd dare to call a friend! --  it's the kind of deception I admired him for never making.  If he has actually made such deceptions in the past, he's not the man I took him to be from his writings.

Other flaws in the piece are lesser because they lie within the scope of fair play for social commentary:  he is guilty of anecdotal evidence for very serious claims, which should expose him to refutation if there is stronger evidence against his positions.  But that is fair play:  refute him.  Or, he makes much of IQ data the value of which is in serious contest; that's a fight that can be had fairly as well.  Or, his recommendations for practical action are uncharitable and may be overwrought; but there, too, a response can be formulated.  (I went down to Freaknik '93 myself, alone and after midnight, and suffered no ill effects; though several young men did advise me that I would be subject to violence if I did not leave, none of them seemed inclined to actually undertake it.  Is that evidence for against his position?  Whichever, it's only one more anecdote:  where is the data?)

The question isn't whether Derbyshire is a racist:  he always proclaimed that he was one.  I'm an antiracist myself, but I've known enough racists who were otherwise good men -- even very good men -- that I have come to think that this is something we need to think through much more carefully than we usually do.

One of them we have almost forgotten:  the Reverend Mr. Wright.  He was a fighting man too, a former Marine, who nevertheless had some hostile and vicious things to say about us and our country.  I always liked him, just because he was the kind of man who would call on God to damn me.  God probably should.  The whole miracle of Easter week is that God did so much to avoid damning those of us who merit it.

Derbyshire has written many things I disagree with, but that's why I always liked him.  His word was good:  right or wrong, he'd defend the ground where he planted his flag.

If his racism has caused him to travel under false flags, deeming black men unworthy of an honest accounting of his friendship, that is a very great offense.  It is worse that it violates a virtue that he had otherwise given every appearance of mastering.  It should not, however, prevent us from recognizing that he is currently defending his honest position -- whether he lives or dies on this ground, he has chosen it and will fight for it.

Long Riders

Grandfather Mountain

Now, this week was an example of a man getting just exactly what he was asking for.  I said I was going to the forest, the home of the playful fates that rule the natural world:  and sure enough, I found them at home.

Clouds Gather in Carolina

I had checked the weather on three separate weather services up until Sunday morning, just before we left.  All of them agreed that -- while there was a mild chance of rain the first day, in places -- the week was going to be warm, dry, and sunny.  No part of that proved to be true.  The merry fates were having a good laugh.

The Pisgah National Forest

The rain started as a couple of little drops in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park -- just a few clouds building up on the far side of the mountains, nothing to worry about.  We ran hard to Curtis Creek to get ahead of it, but no joy.  Just as I began to set up the tent, there was a crack of thunder followed by one of the most intense little storms I've ever seen.  It picked the tent up off the ground and flew it like a kite while I was trying to set it up, shattered one of the fiberglass poles, and left about a half an inch of water in the bottom of it in the two minutes it took to get the tent up and the rain flap attached.

Fire and Water

I still managed to get a fire started.  Many years ago now a Boy Scout leader took us out in a downpour and taught us how.  We stripped the bark off dead wood that was hanging off the ground in trees, and built up a hot little fire out of the smallest twigs so gathered, which could then begin to dry the larger pieces.  The largest pieces, once stripped of bark, we chopped into the thicker pieces to fuzz out the drier wood inside, and put on the fire to dry and burn.

None of us but him could do it at the time, and we boys called him "Liquid Sunshine" behind his back.  Nevertheless, with practice, I found that I could do it.  It's been a skill I've been very glad to have over the years, and this week as much as ever.  So thanks, Liquid Sunshine, wherever you are.

Rocks in Curtis Creek

Once the rain stopped, it was a beautiful place.  Getting up the muddy forest service road to the Blue Ridge Parkway was not easy, however, and the rains came back hard for the rest of the morning.  Thoroughly soaked, we pushed north toward Virginia, which was still reputed to be sunny.

With the heavy weather, it took all day to get there, but sure enough just before we crossed the Virginia line we found blue skies and perfect weather.

Blue Skies in Virginia

What we didn't find was a campsite.  I had checked to be sure the campsites would be open... that is, I checked to be sure the Forest Service campsites would be open.  It never occurred to me that rest of the Federal government's campsites would open on different days.  Turns out that even the Forest Service's campsites don't all open on the same days -- and the Parkway's campsites won't be open until May.

Which is no big deal, if you're in the national forest, because you can camp in a "dispersed" fashion without problems.  There is no dispersed camping on the Parkway.

Oh, and my plans to camp in Shenandoah National Park?  Apparently those campgrounds had a later opening date as well.

Virginia in the Morning

So we said goodbye to Virginia earlier than I had intended, and fell back to the rain-soaked Pisgah forest.  That is the most beautiful country in the world, and never more than when thunderheads are gathered on the peaks.

Two Feet off a Forest Service Road, Looking Down

We also found another campsite that was shut down, the Mortimer site near Grandfather Mountain.  I had checked that one specifically, and was assured it was open; but apparently an inspector showed up and closed it after I checked, due to damage from all the recent rains.

Naturally, the Forest Service didn't put up a sign to this effect at the start of the road, but only at the gates of the campground, thirty miles back. Since we could only go about 10 miles per hour back in that country (my motorcycle is not a dirt bike, in spite of the fact that I periodically insist on using it as such), we spent hours in a thunderstorm getting in, and then had to work our way out to find another place to rest.

It was a grand adventure, in other words. Exactly what I wanted. I was sorry to see it end, as all good things must do. The last day of the ride was misty and cold in the morning, warm and sunny in the afternoon. We cut down through South Carolina, taking the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Parkway.

The Tugaloo River Crossing, from the Georgia Side

I hope you've had a great week in my absence.  It looks as if there's been lots to talk about, but for now, let me just wish you a Happy Easter.

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?