IQ and National Wealth

Foreign Policy magazine has an interesting follow-up to the Derbyshire story, which becomes interesting once the author has finished clearing his throat of disdain.  It turns out that there's a very good argument against a lot of the IQ studies from Africa that people have been relying upon:  The quality of the data is very poor.

Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later.

As that surprising finding might suggest, most of Lynn and Vanhanen's data is, in fact, made up. Of the 185 countries in their study, actual IQ estimates are available for only 81. The rest are "estimated" from neighboring countries. But even where there is data, it would be a stretch to call it high quality. A test of only 50 children ages 13 to 16 in Colombia and another of only 48 children ages 10 to 14 in Equatorial Guinea, for example, make it into their "nationally representative" dataset.

Psychologist Jelte Wicherts at the University of Amsterdam and colleagues trawled through Lynn and Vanhanen's data on Africa. They found once again that few of the recorded tests even attempted to be nationally representative (looking at "Zulus in primary schools near Durban" for example), that the data set excluded a number of studies that pointed to higher average IQs, and that some studies included dated as far back as 1948 and involved as few as 17 people. 

There is a great deal more on the second page of the article, which suggest further problems with the data.  Naturally I find this information to be a relief, but I know that Joe in particular has looked closely at the information and tends to support the conclusions; so, I thought I would post the link here and ask what he (and the rest of you) may think of it.

There's a more interesting genetics-related suggestion (than IQ) in the article as well:

Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have gone even further back, arguing that "genetic distance" -- or the time since populations shared a common ancestor -- has a considerable role to play in the inequality of incomes worldwide. They estimate that variation in genetic distance may account for about 20 percent of the variation in income across countries. 

Spolaore and Wacziarg take pains to avoid suggesting that one line of genetic inheritance is superior to another, preferring instead an interpretation that argues genetic distance is related to cultural differences -- and thus a more complex diffusion of ideas: "the results are consistent with the view that the diffusion of technology, institutions and norms of behavior conducive to higher incomes, is affected by differences in vertically transmitted characteristics associated with genealogical relatedness.… these differences may stem in substantial part from cultural (rather than purely genetic) transmission of characteristics across generations," they write.

Now that argument seems intuitively plausible.  Economic success is largely the result of trade, and trade is most successful where communication is most easy.  That means that barriers to communication and common understanding would tend to complicate trade, and thus lower economic success.  These could be linguistic or cultural barriers, but a genuinely distinct genetic heritage might also affect sense perception and brain activity in interesting ways.  That could cause a long-separate population to have a different way of seeing the world, literally in some cases, which would be a kind of barrier to communication.  Thus, "genetic distance" might indeed raise barriers to economic success.

However, there's a very obvious counter-example:  the Japanese.  Few societies have been as successful historically at isolating themselves, culturally and genetically.  Even today they have a quite distinct culture and genetic heritage; but especially in the 19th century, when American gun boats finally forced their doors, they were as distinct as you could want a population to be.

Japan nevertheless rapidly industrialized and in only a few years was defeating Russia at war; a few years later it was challenging the United States as a naval power.  This was done by addressing cultural distance only:  the Japanese sent people abroad to study (as for example to Paris, where they studied the police department carefully, and then replicated it carefully in Tokyo).  There was no effort to intermarry with gaijin.

That would appear to recommend against a racial/genetic model even here.  Again, though, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

For Lunch Today, A Bully Burger and some Bull$***

Dawsonville Pool Room seized by tax agents, apparently in spite of the fact that the owner was not at fault in owing the taxes, and was in contact with them about making payment.  Apparently that doesn't exempt you from having an armed band of state-employed bandits come shutter your business, lock the door, ransack your cash registers and bust open your vending machines to take the change.

Employees and patrons said agents arrived at the Pool Room about noon Wednesday, ordered everyone out and took possession of the property.... the state agents “took all the money from two register drawers and cleaned out the video gaming machines.” 

If I was a taxman, before I went to guns in Dawson County I'd take a good look at the whiskey still sitting out on the town square, just beside the Pool Hall.  Dawson County has seen their kind come before, but it hasn't always seen them go. 

Every Major's Terrible

Sing this xkcd to the tune of "Modern Major General."


I'm guessing xkcd is not today fielding thousands of furious objections from offending every major all together; but apparently he was wise to leave one or two of them out.

Why is that?  Possibly it's because these majors aren't very defensive; if you're a philosopher you can smile at the cartoon and say, "Well, that's just the analytic philosophers... but it's sure true of them!"  (Or if you're an analytic philosopher, you can say, "Nonsense... where do you think math gets its fundamental assumptions?")  Or if you're a historian, you can point out that history is a nearly ideal preparation for a career as a military officer, a foreign service officer, a political career, or even a career in international business.

Theology can laugh at "X therefore 3X" as a succinct criticism of Aquinas, who adopts Avicenna's proof for the existence of a single, simple, unitary God and then goes on to assert the Trinity; but they can, of course, point out that Aquinas does have a rather lengthy and sophisticated account that the joker might want to grapple with before he dismisses it.  Economists, well, I suspect they will just smile along, recognizing the justice in the remark.

So if you want to mock academics, go right ahead -- as long as you're careful to make a few certain specific exceptions.  Otherwise, kiss your job goodbye.

House opinionating

Sippican goes off on stupid house trends.  He wouldn't approve of some things about our house, but I'm right there with him on other trends:

1.  Snout Houses.  As he says, don't nail your house to the ass-end of your garage.  It's an egregious failure of American design that we can't figure out what to do with the cars.  Here, we put the house on stilts with a wraparound porch on the second level and the garage underneath.  We never put the cars in the garage, though.  They just get parked wherever.

2.   Flat-Screen TVs over Mantels.  Guilty.  Works for us.

3.  Microwaves over Stoves.  I prefer not to put any electronics (other than the vent hood) over the hot stove, but our microwave is built into the upper cabinet, which he disapproves of.  He thinks a microwave belongs in the island, but ours is an island-free galley kitchen, not an 800-square-foot extravaganza.

4.  Cook-Tops on Islands.  See above.  We did put in a nice, powerful hood that's properly vented to the outside.  My mother-in-law's vent hood doesn't vent anywhere.  I fail to see the point.

5.  Open Plan in a Big House.  For the airport-lobby look.  I'll go him one better:  our not-very-big house has the quaint kind of kitchen that's not integrated with the living room.  My husband feels more strongly about this one than I do.  I enjoy houses with the integrated kitchens that seem almost obligatory now, but he's the cook and he doesn't feel like being on stage (or subjected to conversations) when he's getting dinner masterpieces ready to bring out.  The idea usually is to avoid making the kitchen drudge feel isolated, but that's not an issue with him, to put it mildly.  (See "Introverts," below.)  But I chuckle now when I see plans in fancy housing magazines that include an "away room," which used to be what we called any ordinary room with an old-fashioned door.

6.  Very High Ceilings in a Family Room.  Guilty again, and loving it.  We suffered for too many years in a suburban house with 8-foot ceilings.  The common room here goes right up to the peak of the roof and suits us just fine in addition to accommodating my Christmas tree.  All other ceilings are 9 feet or higher.  I'd have been happy with 11 feet everywhere, but it does complicate construction.

7.  Plastic Everything.  Unlike Sippican, we live in a hurricane-threatened swamp and therefore made some concessions to humidity, including vinyl-clad window exteriors and lots of Hardie-plank and a PVC-related extruded material that I can't tell from wood trim once it's painted.  It's dimensionally stable and fire resistant.  I agree with him about anything that's supposed to mimic stained wood, though, including plastic decking material and vinyl fences or rails.  That technology is still in the double-knit polyester design stage.

8.  Ceiling Fans Everywhere.  Guilty again.  This is just more Yankee talk, frankly.  I feel less strongly about it, but my husband wants a breeze from above in every room, all the time, especially when he's trying to sleep.  The ceilings are high enough to accommodate the fans.

9.  Enormous Jacuzzi Tubs.  No, but we have two claw-foot tubs and no showers.  Sippican claims no one will bathe in front of a window, but it sure doesn't bother us -- though of course we're isolated behind trees and up on stilts.  If we can't manage to die here, I'm sure the lack of showers will give us fits in a resale.  For that matter, buyers probably will wonder why we didn't hide the toilet in a little closet (not me; too claustrophobic) and why we're perfectly able to share a single sink in the master bath.  Neither of us places time-consuming or complicated demands on a sink.

10.  Powder Blue and Cocoa Brown Color Scheme.  Not our thing.  I've seen worse color schemes, though.

Sippican doesn't mention my number-one objection in modern housing trends:  flat, "picture frame" exterior window trim, like the one pictured on the right.  I want a proper window sill on the bottom, with a nice shadow line.  Our framers were deeply confused by this request.

More Tea?

Guess it's a good night for the TEA Party, who staked a lot on beating the Senate's longest-serving Republican... and beat him.  There was a lot of talk about how the Presidential primary showed that the TEA Party movement was short-lived, but the TEA Party is only two years old.  You can't stage a winning Presidential campaign in two years; you have to start almost as soon as the previous one is over, as then-Senator Obama did rather than fulfilling the office to which he had so recently been elected.

Meanwhile North Carolina joins the rest of the South in constitutionally banning gay marriage.  I had to look this up -- Georgia passed its amendment in 2004, before the issue commanded my attention in any serious way.  A quick review of what I wrote here in 2003/4 was that, while the issue didn't really interest me, it was properly decided at the state level by constitutional amendments being a clear example of a power reserved to the states or to the people by the 10th Amendment.  Thus, amendments like tonight's in North Carolina seem like a reasonable way for the people to clarify just how much power they are prepared for the state to wield:  the power to regulate an existing institution, or the power to redefine it?

I have no idea how I voted on the 2004 amendment in Georgia; I don't remember it at all.  It was only later that, studying Aquinas, I came to understand just what was wrong with the structure of matrimony as it exists in America today.  My position against "gay marriage" is a consequence of that more basic argument of the nature of marriage, which we talked about at length here.

In any event, what I find surprising about the NC vote is the lopsided nature of the victory, and the huge turnout.  The foes of the amendment appear to have outspent the supporters two-to-one; the supporters carried the day anyway, 61-39 percent at current count.  That's a big victory for an amendment running into a two-to-one spending headwind.

So:  a big TEA Party victory, and a strong social conservative turnout in the face of a spending spree.  Those are good omens as we look to November.

I don't think crudité sales are going to finance that band trip

Massachusetts performs a valuable service as a laboratory for nutso social experiments, right up there with California.  Its newest contribution is a movement to phase out school bake sales, those nefarious attempts to corrupt our children's innate preference for watercress over cookies.

I don't know if we're losing the battle on obesity, but the fatheads definitely are taking over.

Prison Songs

This first one is by Richard the Lionheart, composed during his imprisonment while Duke Leopold of Austria was seeking ransom for him.  Leopold was excommunicated for imprisoning a crusader, but the ransom was heavy all the same.



I don't think they ever did get old Railroad Bill, though the Alabama boys sure did try.



Johnny Cash did a lot of prison songs.  This one is from San Quentin.



But the king of prison songs in recent years is David Allan Coe.  He went to jail at nine years old, and spent most of his time for the next twenty years inside.  He had an interesting career after that, living for some years in a hearse he insisted on parking right outside the Grand Old Opry, and later in a cave in Tennessee.  I wouldn't watch this one if you are of a sensitive nature, but if you do watch it, give some credit to the prison officials who let him do this bit for a crowd inside.

Well, at least they've got their priorities straight

The defendants in the KSM mass-murder terrorist trial are worried, according to their lawyer, that they will be unable to focus on the defense of their lives if female attorneys for the prosecution keep exposing their knees.  Also, the defendants want to be protected from committing a sin if they can't keep their eyes away.

Hey, at least the chicks at the prosecutor's table aren't giving them the Sharon Stone treatment.  We do observe civilized limits.

One of the defendants had to be carried into the courtroom in a "restraint chair," which puts me in mind of the Elmore Leonard line about federal marshals who assisted a defendant in regaining his composure.  Maybe blinkers would assist the composure of the others. But there probably are going to be lots of things about a capital murder trial that will be unavoidably painful.

SAWB

Once upon a time Atlanta's mayor, Andrew Young, explained why the Mondale presidential campaign was not going very well.  It was because, he said, it was run by a bunch of "smart-ass white boys."  The Late, Great Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution adopted the phrase to introduce himself to audiences.  "Finally, I know what I am!" he said, in that early day for affirmative action.  "I'm a smart-ass white boy!"

Naturally, I thought of that this weekend.



The thing is, Tucker Carlson is wrong.  So is she, though, and just where she apparently doesn't see it.

The United Nations this weekend was talking about how the USA needs to give some land back to the Native Americans.  It's easy to mock the UN here, but let's look at the substance of the complaint.

Close to a million people live on the US's 310 Native American reservations. Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos on reservations but most have not. 

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years. 

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country's poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

This is the reason why Native Americans are granted affirmative action benefits.  If someone fights out of Pine Ridge and makes it to college, they've already overcome a massive burden.  The whole point of the practice is to correctly judge just how much harder it was for them to get there than it was for those who had an easier road.  We ought to want this.  That's where Tucker is wrong:  the system isn't unjust by nature.  For them, we ought to want it.

"I should in that case hold you," replied the yeoman, "a friend to the weaker party."

 "Such is the duty of a true knight at least," replied the Black Champion; "and I would not willingly that there were reason to think otherwise of me."

The problem with what Warren did was that she made a mockery out of the system.  This is where Greene was wrong.  The question isn't whether she was qualified -- even well-qualified professors, when they are looking for a job at Harvard, are looking for any advantage that may come to hand.  That she is already a strong candidate is just the point.  This is not a system for the strong to use to tilt things even further in their favor.  It is a system that is meant to uphold the weak against the strong.

I'm just as Cherokee as Elizabeth Warren -- to judge by "blood quanta," which is apparently the standard that we're now supposed to apply.  Apparently the currently serving Cherokee Nation Chief is no more than that.  In my case it comes even further back in the family history, when this was frontier country and white women were very rare (a constant in the story of the American frontier is that women move to the frontier, wherever it is in any generation, rather more slowly).  A couple of my frontiersman ancestors took Cherokee brides.  It works out to the same percentage.  It also means my family is American since the mid-1700s, which counts for... exactly nothing, in determining who is a "real American," according to what I'm given to understand is the acceptable standard.

Never once in my life did I think of marking myself as "Native American" for some advantage.  It would be a positive insult to those people on Pine Ridge if I did.  I've suffered nothing for it; everyone whose family has been in the South for two generations, black or white or otherwise, has that much Native American "blood quanta" if they care to track it down.  For the people of Pine Ridge, it's everything; for us, it's a very minor part of the story of what it means to be American.

Most of us would be called "white boys" by our FOX News commentator; and why not?  I have no reason to buck the term if Lewis Grizzard wouldn't.  Nevertheless I'll bet if you looked, he was at least 1/32nd Native American.  All of us are, and that means nothing at all.  It's wrong to help yourself by taking from the weak and the poor.  If law or custom make it easy to do so, we are wrong if we take advantage -- and if the law backs us in our wrongness, then the law is just as wrong as we are.  Everyone knows that.

Grim, last winter.

Innies and outies

I enjoyed this short article about tips for managing an introverted nature, especially the spirited discussion in the comments section from introverts insisting "I just want to be me."  Like many of them, I'm a bit baffled by why our extroverted brethren enjoy the gatherings of strangers that constitute their mysterious social life.  If I'm going to hang out with people (especially people I don't know well), I want to have an agenda:  to play music together, to paint the house, or at least to cook or share a meal.  Failing that, we'd better have extremely strong ties and shared interests in order to prevent the conversation from flagging.

But as I'm a bit cold-natured and socially clueless, in recent years I've made an effort to mingle.  I always hang out in the parish hall after Sunday services, for instance, and since that's not a social convention that does anything for me naturally, I concentrate on practicing listening skills.  (Left to my own instincts, I'd babble nervously and become a bore.)  After a few years of this, I can't say it's grown on me much.  Every so often it leads to a new friendship -- that spark you both feel when you realize you'd rather talk to each other than mingle -- and it always leads to a greater awareness of the situation and needs of those around me, which is good regardless of whether it's fun.  Nevertheless, it retains an ersatz quality that reminds me I'm in alien territory.

I'll always prefer a few intense relationships to a large number of friendly ones, and focused conversations to casual interaction, not to mention (usually) solitude to groups.  It will always be easier to get me to come to a party if its purpose is to pick up trash and then enjoy a picnic than if the agenda is to stand around with mixed drinks.  As you can imagine, I was just about the world's worst networker as a law partner, a real stinker in that department.  I was a lot more useful as the person you could tell to stay up three nights in a row in order to produce an outstanding chapter 11 plan on brutally short notice that would stand up on appeal.  That kind of thing is hard work, but it doesn't hold a candle to the drain I experienced from having to attend cocktail parties.  Oh, how glad I am to leave behind any professional obligation to attend cocktail parties.  In a sane world I'd have found a way to get double my usual hourly rate for that chore, instead of having to pretend it was so much fun that I'd happily give up my nights and weekends to endure it.

The fact remains that we all have to mingle from time to time, and it's nice for us introverts to have a few tricks to make it less excruciating for ourselves and those around us.  It's not like the extroverts have any plans to return the favor by learning how to structure social activities to our satisfaction, but that's OK.  The extroverts will be happier with each other's company, anyway.  They would hate our idea of parties and probably can't think of a good reason to learn otherwise.

Cheaper medicine

I've never yet failed to enjoy a TED lecture.  I have to ration myself, because my satellite internet connection won't permit me to stream video for very many minutes in any one day.  This lecture is about using off-the-shelf video game units to build for about $100 the kind of eyeball-controlled electronic devices that, up to now, paralyzed patients have had to pay $50,000 or even $200,000 for.

Patients with severe skeletal-muscular problems such as spinal injury or neurological disease tend to preserve their ability to control their eyes.  Not only the optical nerve, but also the other eye-related nerves, are more like an extension of the brain itself, in contrast with your other bodily movements, which are mediated through the spine.  When you add this ability to cunning little devices that track and respond to eye movements, it means that profoundly disabled people not only can web-surf but also can communicate and even drive mechanisms like wheelchairs.  The lecturer in this video has figured out ways to make these devices so cheap that they're reasonably available to just about anyone.

The price of cure

A history of surgery in the New England Journal of Medicine paints a vivid picture of why healthcare is such a large part of the modern budget, while at the same time being such a new part that its cost continues to outrage our feelings and expectations.  Only a little over a century and a half ago, surgery was confined almost exclusively to the kind of interventions that could be completed so superficially and rapidly that they were somewhat likely to do more good than harm.  Live-saving amputations were the earliest examples.  Lacking anesthesia, surgeons put all their emphasis on brute speed.  With the discovery of ether, they slowly realized they could afford to take their time and refine their techniques.  With the further discovery of hand-washing and sterilization of equipment, surgeons found themselves able and justified in expanding their repertoires to more challenging areas, such as the torso, and to less emergent medical conditions.  Today, medical science acknowledges more than 2,500 standard surgical procedures, often performed with minimal invasiveness, and with a success rate undreamed of in the mid-19th century.

We no longer expect to die of such common troubles as appendicitis.  We don't yet, however, quite expect to pay for their cure.  Unlike food, shelter, and clothing, the provision of which has been an expected economic burden on individuals and families since the dawn of history, medicine still somehow strikes us as a miracle cure that some kindly wizard should bring to the door in a diamond phial.

I'll have another

Always fun to see a horse come from behind, especially when the jockey is a long-shot youngster.  For most of this clip, I'll Have Another is way back in the middle.  It's only in the last 300 yards or so that he explodes.  The announcers said as a yearling colt he could have been had for $11,000.

Super duper

The full moon will be will be about 221,802 miles from Earth tonight, which is about 15,300 miles (roughly 7%) closer than average, and therefore is making its way into the popular consciousness as a "supermoon."  Wikipedia sniffs that it's really called a perigee-syzygy, and that indeed all full moons are really just plain old syzygys.  ("Syzygies," which probably is more correct, lacks orthographical style and balance.)  I don't think the snooty name is going to catch on; it's hard to rhyme and it doesn't scan worth a hoot. Although "perigee" and "syzygy" aren't bad dactylic oblique rhymes for each other, they wouldn't make a satisfying limerick.

There's been some crazy talk lately about how much stronger the tidal forces will be, or how big and bright the moon is going to look, or even what social paroxysms may be observed.  Newspapers tend to say it will be "14% bigger and brighter," whatever that means.  A disk area of 14% greater size, I suppose?  That sounds bigger than it looks to the naked eye.  Here's what a 12% increase looks like, from 2011's perigee-syzygy-superdupermegamoon:

As for tides, the effect hasn't been that great in the past.  Supermoons happen pretty often, about once a year.  The variation results from our satellite's elliptical orbit.  Although the moon's orbit has a period (obviously) of one month, the "bump" of the ellipse is out of synch with the full-new-moon-phase cycle by a couple of days, so it takes a little over a year to repeat a line-up of the full moon with the short end of the ellipse.  Solar eclipses (not to be confused with ellipses) also are affected by how close the moon is to the Earth, as well as how close the Earth is to the sun; that can make the difference between a really dark eclipse and one with a bright ring of sun peeking out all around the dark moon.  Eclipses, however, exhibit much longer cycles than supermoons, because eclipses also are affected by the fact that the moon's orbit around the earth is about 5 degrees off of the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, a retrogressing wobble that makes the plane of the moon's orbit cross the plane of the Earth's orbit in a direct line between Earth and sun only every 18 years or so.

It's been so cloudy here that I'm not sure we're going to see the supermoon at all, but we'll make sure the guns are loaded anyway, in case of a zombie apocalypse.

Sears, Roebuck, and the Blues...

The claim here is that the Sears Catalog was midwife to the blues.

You know what?  Tell me what you think of the argument.  Let's take it from the top.

Rethinking the Crusades

Jonah Goldberg's new book is not of any more interest to me than was his last book, but I saw via Instapundit that he had posted an excerpt on the Crusades.  That is a subject that interests me, so I read through what he had to say.

His general point is that the Crusades should be thought of as a kind of defensive war, rather than a kind of proto-imperialism.  Further, he adds, rather than an affront to Islam they represent one of Islam's minor victories.

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about the Crusades.

Most of what you'll see written on the subject in popular sources will focus on either the First Crusade (characterized by its mystical vision of St. George, and apparently miraculous success in recapturing Jerusalem), or the Third Crusade (with the irresistible characters of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin).  What we call "the First Crusade," though, wasn't really the first one at all.

If by "Crusade" we mean a war undertaken by Western fighting men who fought to capture land from Muslims in return for a spiritual promise from the Church that their sins would be expiated by the violence, we should look to 1063.  The Pope at that time was Alexander II, who sent a bull to clerics in France to encourage French knights to join in fighting against the Muslims in what is now Spain.  This is thirty years before the "First Crusade," but it was followed by several more.

The Papacy held that the Iberian peninsula was the actual property of St. Peter, and therefore belonged to the Church:  a series of Popes from Alexander to the famous Urban encouraged one crusade after another to recapture the land and restore it to the dominion of the Pope.  The kings of the Spanish kingdoms began to enjoy significant success, but of course they didn't wish to accept the domination of the Pope once they had captured the land.  The Church eventually settled its claims in return for properties, chiefly granted to the new Crusader orders -- the Templars and the Hospitallers, that is.  Less well known, though, were a whole series of Crusader knightly orders that were particular to the Spanish crusades, set up by the kings along the same lines as the more famous orders to fight in Spain.

The popes even went so far as to issue an order forbidding Spanish knights from going to the Crusades in the east, because they were needed to fight at home.

Now, if you factor in the Spanish crusade with the Eastern ones, the question of whether 'the Crusades' represent an Islamic victory looks a bit different.  The Muslims eventually recaptured Jerusalem, and indeed Constantinople; however, they lost Spain entirely.  Furthermore, the structures set up to conquer in Spain were largely transferable to the New World in 1492 -- that is, the year when the last Islamic lands fell in Spain, while Columbus opened the way west.  The effect of the Spanish crusades was thus the conquest and conversion of the entire population of South and Central America; it would have been the conversion of the whole of the Americas if not for the religious wars that split the Christian faith.

In addition, to get a full appreciation of the Crusades you have to look at the ones internal to Europe, where they were about enforcing discipline and putting down dangerous heresies.  The success of these was mixed -- indeed, the religious wars just mentioned could be seen as the final failure -- but they are also an important part of the picture.

Seen as a whole, the Crusades become a different picture.  They were far more than an attempt to recapture lands from Islam, and far more successful than at first may appear.  They didn't win everywhere, or for all time, but the strength and size of Christianity even today is directly related to their prosecution.

By the way, if you want to read a book on the Spanish Crusades, an excellent one is Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain by Joseph F. O'Callaghan.  His writing on medieval military organization and financing is somewhat general, but he puts together the history of events very well.

Croatia

Now here's a video that's probably worth your time.  It's an adaptation of the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th to a tourism video for Croatia.  The result is, for the most part, remarkable.

Of course, the architecture and a few cultural icons aside, what really carries it is Beethoven.  And that reminds me, again, of a problem we have often considered.  The beauty of the music that came out of Europe from the 1700s to the late 1800s was unrivaled in human history; Croatia has a claim to it because Croatia is European, and indeed a central part of the same romantic movement in Europe that inspired Beethoven.

If the music of that era is unequaled, though, it is we ourselves who fail to equal it.  The lady who performs here is a fine cellist; she replicates her part well.  Who writes for her now, as once he did?

Practicing chaos

H/t Ace.  Naturally I can't find confirmation of any of these quotations, but I did find another unprovable one:  Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is said to have tried to get a rise out of Winston Churchill before WWII by predicting that, if it came to war, the Italians would side with Germany.  Churchill replied, "It seems only fair.  We had them last time."

Cradle To Grave

Wow.

Give the man credit:  he's standing up for cradle-to-grave government support, at least for women.  The focus on how women benefit from cradle-to-grave government wardship is an interesting one.

To some degree this is a practical fact of the kind of welfare state we've put together.  We tend to make transfer payments to the poor and the old.  Women make up the bulk of the one category because they tend to be the child-rearing parent in divorced families.  They make up the bulk of the other category because they live substantially longer.

Thus the split is an organic one, sort of:  it grows naturally out of supporting the poor and the old through government transfer payments.  The Obama administration is just doubling down on it, and trying to think of many ways to craft additional woman-specific payments and benefits.

Still, time was that accusing someone of being in favor of "cradle-to-grave" government involvement in our lives was a pretty serious charge.  Apparently the Obama administration thinks that, at least for women, the time has come to embrace it.

"Composite" Girlfriends & Literary Allusions

There seems to be a lot of talk today about the President's admission that the girlfriend in one of his autobiographies is a "composite."  That's an interesting thing to have done.

On the one hand, I can appreciate how it would be a decent act to keep the real girlfriends of one's past out of the glare of the public eye.  If you were writing an autobiography for the purpose of presenting yourself as a public figure, with the intent of trying to push yourself off in politics, it might be kind to leave real names out -- especially when you were talking about sensitive matters of the heart.

On the other hand, a "composite"?  Could you make a composite of two or three people you cared about deeply?  Wouldn't it rather be the case that you can't help but see such people as the individuals that they are?

Consider the letter making the rounds today:

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — [T.S.] Eliot is of this type,” Obama wrote in one letter to McNear. “Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

This indicates that the speaker thinks of himself as outside "the western tradition," which ought to be problematic enough for the President's defenders.  What strikes me, though, is the way that the literary figures are completely interwoven with the thoughts.  This is common among people who have spent their lives immersed in literature.

I cannot recall ever hearing the President speak this way, though.  He's given a lot of speeches, but literary references are rare within them, and essentially absent from his off-the-cuff remarks.

Now it could be that the private, girlfriend-seeking Barack Obama is just a very different man from the public speaker; apparently Nixon was that way (as Cassandra recently pointed out).  Still, Nixon was also a lot less public as a public figure:  the times allowed a President to be different in private than in public in a way that they don't seem to do now.

So it strikes me as odd.  Either the literature is deeply embedded in the thought process, or it is not.  I've seen no evidence of it outside the book.  What to make of that?

What Do You Mean By "Compassion"?

So, there's this study that says that atheists are more motivated by compassion than believers.  Now, if you are like me, you read this and you think, "Wow -- that's surprising.  So, if you're a random guy who needs help, you're better off looking for help with atheists than with nuns?  That's not what I'd have expected."

It's also not what the study proves, as it turns out.

"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."

So, in other words, religion performs the expected function after all:  it drives people to help out that random guy.  Without it, you're likely to help if and only if you have an existing emotional connection with the individual who wants help.

That's not shocking at all.  It's just what you'd expect.

Outlaws!

I have to say I find this really, really funny.

Some black bloc man bigger than me with bandana tried to take my camera from me violently fuck that! Smash the state not my camera
Stephanie Keith (@Steffikeith) May 1, 2012
Source: @Steffikeith

It's one thing to be an outlaw if you're prepared to live outside the law.  But if you smash the state, dear lady, who's going to protect your camera?  Twitter?

Eastward, ho

The problem with federalism is that sometimes the states run experiments whose results are hard to discount.  This week has seen a flood of California-is-boned articles, summed up for us in a handy way here, but this short set of statistics stood out for me:

From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California also ranked in the top five or ten in a number of troubling contests, from most-taxed to most-regulated. It typically shares honors with New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.

Rationalizing markets

A healthcare blog makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we treat legal fees like medical costs:

It makes one think: If the lawyers are designing the health-care system, shouldn’t they be forced to operate under regulations similar to those they’re imposing? How, for example, do lawyers get paid? Today, they negotiate fees with clients. That hardly seems fair. In health care, doctors don’t negotiate fees with patients, they get paid according to an opaque schedule determined by health plans. Lawyers should do the same. The solution is “legal insurance.” After all, who amongst us knows when we’ll need a lawyer? It is often an unpredictable expense, and yet the “market” seems to have failed to provide such insurance. Government must intervene.

The sad truth, of course, is that we do something very much like this in all fee-shifting cases in the legal field, and it works about as well there as is does in the healthcare field.  It's a good point, though.  Why don't we imagine that we can apply the lessons of healthcare to every critical need in life?  Why do we trust people to supply themselves with their own food and shelter, for instance?  It's true that healthcare often demands more foresight than our other daily needs.  There aren't many people who are so disorganized that they can't be trusted to plan for satisfying their daily hunger, but many people will fail to plan now for a statistically likely medical bill in ten or twenty years.  Similarly, some people make a concerted effort to save up for their children's college tuition well ahead of time, while others look around one day in shock and realize their eldest is 18 and needs to do something about it next month.  Now where is that student loan application?  And by the way, I'm 55 and would like to retire soon.  Who's been saving up for me?

Nevertheless, it puzzles me why people imagine the government can substitute for their own role in virtually all long-term planning.  As Glenn Reynolds said recently, liberalism includes the belief that the voters aren't capable of planning for their own retirement, but they're capable of planning for mine.

May Day

Today we enter the Cathedral of May, that month when the fullest beauty of spring gives way to the richness of summer.

Though the whitest branches of Georgia's spring come earlier in the year, the mountain laurel are like this now.  Here is a branch from the shoulders of the Oconee.

The greenwood in May always brings to my mind the old stories of Robin Hood, who was always happiest in the Maytime.  Eight years ago I quoted part of a ballad of Robin Hood in May:  today I realize that ballad can be sung to the tune of the May Day Carol, given above.  Here's the first few lines:  try it and see!


But how many months be in the year?   There are thirteen, I say; The midsummer moon is the merryest of all   Next to the merry month of May.
I
IN summer time, when leaves grow green,      
  And flowers are fresh and gay, Robin Hood and his merry men   Were [all] disposed to play.
II
Then some would leap, and some would run,   And some use artillery:      
‘Which of you can a good bow draw,   A good archer to be?
III
‘Which of you can kill a buck?   Or who can kill a doe? Or who can kill a hart of grease,      
  Five hundred foot him fro?’
IV
Will Scadlock he kill’d a buck,   And Midge he kill’d a doe, And Little John kill’d a hart of grease,   Five hundred foot him fro.

The Elizabeth Warren Affirmative Action Dust-Up

Pictured: a wild-eyed savage delighting in the destruction of the civilization of the West; and a Cherokee warrior, ca. 1836

AceOfSpadesHQ is having fun with Harvard's alleged use of Elizabeth Warren's citing of perhaps spurious Cherokee ancestry to demonstrate its commitment to minority hiring. As usual, the humorous point wins me over completely, but Ace loses me when he suggests that Warren might not have landed her cushy job at Harvard without this maneuver. Warren was my bankruptcy law professor when she was but a professor at the lowly University of Houston law school, back in the Pleistocene. She was a fine teacher and a very, very bright woman with an organized mind, not at all given to partisan harangues. In the decades since, she's remained in the public eye -- public in the context of bankruptcy lawyers -- publishing a number of quantitative papers about the results of real bankruptcy cases. She seems a perfect match for the Harvard Law milieu.  I don't agree with her politics, but there's nothing wrong with her professional achievements.

The perils of brunch

"No, I don't want a bloody mary with pickled brussels sprouts and beets.  I'm not interested in octopus salad with pearl onions.  I'm a prey animal.  I just want to freeze."

A Question of Scale, and a Question of Proportion

So Dan Rather has a report today -- I had thought he was retired -- on the horror of how our grandparents used to deal with unwanted pregnancy.

In the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, being an unwed mother carried a significant stigma in America. It’s now called the “baby scoop” era and during this time young women -- usually in their teens -- were either hidden at home, sent to live with distant relatives or quietly dispatched to maternity homes to give birth. 

Estimates are as many as 1.5 million young mothers who say they were forced -- some just minutes after delivery -- to hand over their babies for adoption during this period.  It was a decision that they seldom made on their own.

It's easy to sympathize with the mothers here, for whom this must have been a traumatic and upsetting experience.  However, note the scale:  1.5 million over a period of thirty years.

The CDC estimates that the number of abortions in America since 1973 is about 50 million.

Even allowing for the existence of a certain number of illegal abortions in the 50s-1973, it's clear that the loss of the social stigma has vastly increased the scale of the problem.  Unintended pregnancies are now much more common than they were.

That's the question of scale; but there's also a question of proportion.  Is it proportionate to traumatize a young woman with social stigma when she has done something so reckless as to create a life she cannot support?  Possibly; it's harsh, but it need not be cruel.  Sometimes a harsh solution is necessary, though cruelty never is.

Is it proportionate to kill a child for the crime of being unwanted?  Of course it is not.

Likewise, there's a question of proportion in terms of addressing the injustice that results.  Insofar as it was wrong to force these young women to give up their children, many of these children can now be located in time for them to share a part of their lives with the mothers who now wish to contact them.  Some will have lived and died, but most should be able to connect even now.  A child killed in the womb, by contrast, can never be recovered:  the injustice to the child cannot even be ameliorated, let alone put right.  Should the mother change her mind, years later, she will find no recourse in the courts.

It appears, then, that our new solution has (a) made the problem far more common and also (b) morally worse.  Our grandparents, so often mocked as oppressive haters of women, may have had the better solution.

Yet if our way is practically worse, and also morally worse, it is superior in one respect:  it takes better care of the feelings of the adults involved.  The women who make the choice feel that at least society respects them enough not to interfere, however much they may still regret the choice they make; and the rest of us are never forced to deal with anyone who is aggrieved, as these mothers were by the forced adoptions, because the aggrieved party is helpfully dead.  If the standard for judging the policy is how careful it is of the feelings of everyone within our social circle, then this policy is a far better.

Romney Challenges Genghis Khan for "Furthest Right"

Oh, my.   Besen of MSNBC shares some alarming intelligence with The New York Daily News:

Romney has actually become the most far-right major party nominee in generations, eager to make the Reagan and Bush presidencies look almost liberal by comparison.

Apparently Romney has made it clear he'll dismantle the fabric of American society and re-write the social contract.  In fact, the author of this article uses language that I could swear is a verbatim copy from what I was reading four years ago about another candidate:

The man has spent a year showing the American electorate a road map, pointing at a distant, radical destination. Only the deliberately blind could miss the signals, and only a fool would assume he’ll change direction once he’s in power.

I feel his pain.

How not to fight over politics

Miss Manners, as usual, has fine advice for avoiding rude, unpleasant conversational gambits without resorting oneself to rudeness or unpleasantness.  A reader reports that she is well known in her community for espousing a particular controversial cause.  She prefers not to discuss it 100% of the time, however, particularly at parties.  When someone buttonholes her at a social event and wants to chew her out on the subject, Miss Manners suggests:

Try assuming an interested look, and without responding to the attack on your issue, say, “Tell me about your favorite cause. Besides this, what do you think is our most important question of the day?”

This doesn’t just change the subject, if it works. It challenges such a person to show whether he has ideas of his own, or just goes around attacking others. Miss Manners realizes there are risks. He could be tempted to say, “Stopping wrongheaded people like you,” although personal insults at a party would only mark him as even ruder than the confrontation, which might be passed off as conversation. The real risk is that you will then attack his ideas, and it will be a draw. The way to win is to listen intently, say pleasantly, “Hmmm, interesting you should think that,” and excuse yourself to get a drink.

Her readers add even more useful advice (sometimes even WaPo readers can get a clue).  One suggests calling over to a notorious motormouth nearby:  "Oh, Catherine dear, I have someone I want you to meet. Do come over and tell us about your weekend in the Hamptons" -- then escape and leave them to each other.  Another proposes explaining that she remembers better what she reads than what she hears, so would the antagonized person mind writing her a letter? Better yet, invite him to attend her next scheduled public appearance and discuss the matter there, because if he had really wanted a serious discussion he would have already done one or the other.  Another suggests the all-purpose: "I'm so sorry my opinion upsets you. Will you excuse me, please?"

Not all readers could get the message.  One wrote:

Yeah but that is kind of hard to do when the person has been advocating taking away your marriage rights for instance and then you find yourself sitting next to the blowhard at a dinner party. I would take delight in making them as uncomfortable as they have made me in my private life. He should get no pass because he wants down time from his hateful positions. Maybe he should rethink his stand on this issue if so many people are in vehement disagreement with him on it.

Fun dinner guest, I imagine. It was interesting that quite a few commenters got hung up trying to guess what the unpopular cause was, as if they couldn't decide whether Mr. Let's-Fight-at-a-Party was rude until they knew whether they agreed with him on the controversial issue.

A Bourbon Interlude

Although of course we all know Tocqueville, I had not been aware of the political backstory to his famous American tour.

The Revolution of 1830 overthrew the Bourbon king Charles X and put the Orléanist Louis-Philippe on the throne. Tocqueville reluctantly took a loyalty oath to keep his job. This placed him in a difficult position with his pro-Bourbon family and relatives, who thought his actions treasonous. But his oath did nothing to allay the regime's mistrust of him. This suspicion was not unwarranted; in 1832 some of Tocqueville's relatives would be involved in a plot to overthrow Louis-Philippe. Beaumont fell under suspicion for similar reasons. He and Tocqueville therefore sought a pretext to leave the country for a while. 

Fortunately for them, a shift was taking place, not only in politics but also in penal practices: torture and public executions were being replaced by efforts to rehabilitate criminals. The United States was seen as a vast social laboratory, in which prison experiments were being conducted that might profit France. Tocqueville and Beaumont were therefore able to convince their supervisors to grant them a leave of absence to travel to the United States to study American prisons.

It's interesting that was his reason for coming.  The shift to rehabilitation is something we've discussed from time to time; it turned out to be based on theories of psychology that hold no water at all.  Sadly, if anyone followed the American model of prisons, they made a detour into an expensive new way of failing to solve the problem.

They're subject to an additional complaint, which is that they were probably worse forms of torture than the ones they replaced.  Prisoners were forced to remain silent twenty-four hours a day, and kept in solitary confinement when they weren't working in gangs:  they were also lashed regularly.  The stated point was to "break down their sense of self," so they would be easy to reform.  It's roughly the idea later mocked by A Clockwork Orange, but before the advent of psychoactive drugs.

So it turns out that Tocqueville came to learn about something we did poorly but were reputed to do well, and ended up learning about (and writing about) something we did well in fact.  That shows a good judgment. 

Ice Cream

I went into the kitchen a while ago, and poking around in the freezer I found a container of ice cream that I didn't know we had.  It's been a rather warm day, so I took it to my wife and asked her if she would like some.  "No," she said, "but you enjoy yourself."

So I stuck the container against her bare shoulder, which caused her to kick and scream until she could get away.  This took a moment as she was trapped against a countertop at the time.  "What?"  I said.  "You told me to enjoy myself.  Can you think of anything I could have done with the ice cream that I would have enjoyed more?"

And do you know, she went red in the face, turned on her heels, and fled running out of the room!

Women.  Who can understand them?

When communication makes you feel further away

A Maggie's link led me to a shrink site I'd never seen before, which emphasizes judgment over feelings.  Not pretending feelings aren't there, just remembering that we have other cognitive functions, too, to keep our lives in order and avoid repetitive disasters.  His advice for the lovelorn:  feelings are exciting, but next time work on finding someone with good character before you dive deep into the great emotional rush.  Also: "Before we discovered communication as the solution to family conflict and misunderstanding, we knew better. Back then, people thought before they spoke."

Dr. Lastname offers sensible advice to a mother who worries that she's trapped in an endless cycle of post-binge feeling-fests with her adult son, when what she really needs to do is send him to AA:

Tell him he has to find strength in himself by thinking hard about what he wants for himself and what drug and alcohol abuse does to him. He’ll need to get a lot stronger before he can stop and stay stopped, and talking to others about addiction and hearing their stories can give him the strength. Still, he’ll have to work hard every day, and the part of him that wants to use is pretty strong and will never go away. 

No, you’re not discouraging him — false hope yields false courage — you’re telling him that life and his own feelings have totally discouraged him and he’s going to have to learn how to think differently in order to get his courage back. You’re not telling him anything he won’t learn from AA, but they’re the lessons that will help him take back his life. 

The immediate response may well be negative; he may claim you’re letting him down and making him feel worse, and may openly regret talking to you. Instead of getting defensive, tell him you see a positive way forward and that your vision differs from his. Then stand pat, don’t argue, and stand ready to help him whenever he takes a positive step. It may be awhile before you feel close again, but, if and when you do, it will be the real thing. Until then, you can talk all the time, but every conversation will make you feel further away.

He also offers excellent practical advice for dealing with intrusive nags:

If your mother is needy and believes that intimacy is a matter of sharing spontaneous feelings, it’s natural for her to try to get close by asking you direct, intrusive questions and then sharing her honest response. Anyone who does that is, however, is just somebody who has never figured out that this method never works (and probably never will). She gets an A for expressing her feelings, and you know what grade she gets from me. 

Don’t make the same mistake by assuming that sharing your honest objections (to her honest questions) will lead to improvement; she might never learn her lesson, but you should know better. If your goal was to see whether confronting her negative behavior works, now you know. No need to repeat the experiment, the results will always be the same (and awful). 

So put aside your disappointment and consider other approaches, like steering the conversation to pleasant topics of common interest, or politely refusing to talk about personal topics. The more you stifle your own need for intimacy, the more likely you are to steer the dinner table agenda towards topics that work and come away appreciating the desert and not hating the conversation.

Asymmetrical deafness

More support for Jonathan Haidt's thesis that conservatives have a clue what progressives think, but progressives cannot return the favor.  Frank Luntz managed to get the WaPo editorial page to print a short piece exposing five major myths that the left believes about the right:

1. Conservatives want to smother government in its crib.  Luntz believes polls are beginning to show that conservatives are less concerned about "large government, small citizens" theory than about practical measures to ensure increased accountability, so that whatever is spent on government will give demonstrable bang for the buck.
2. Conservatives want to drive all illegal immigrants to the border and dump them in the desert. Polling suggests widespread Republican support for "tall fences and wide gates," and for some kind of path to citizenship for immigrants who have demonstrated good citizenship in various ways, including military service.
3. Conservatives believe Wall Street can do no wrong. Liberals are confusing Wall Street with Main Street.  Conservatives are more enamored of the free market than of abstract "capitalism," and would happily see some of the miscreants in the housing market scandal strung up by their thumbs (though they may disagree about who the miscreants are).
4. Conservatives want to smother Social Security and Medicare in their cribs. In fact, most conservatives want to preserve them, but believe they'll collapse altogether without reform.  Conservatives are also much more likely to believe that reforms based on individual choice and market competition will be broadly benign in their results.
5. Conservatives don't care about inequality. Actually, conservatives differ from liberals in their beliefs about the best way to combat inequality, and are much more focused on opportunity than result.

Luntz might as well have held his breath, as far as the WaPo readership goes.  The comments are a hoot.  Luntz is a liar.  Luntz is a paid Rethuglican hack.  Conservatives don't really believe any of these things, but have been trained to say they do in order to mask their nefarious spot.  Conservatives hate charity because it's paid to black people and hate President Obama for the same reason.  All conservatives want to do is take reproductive choice away from women and steal tuition money from poor students.  They do it just because they're mean.  A few, milder readers report that they know some conservatives personally, and can confirm that they're not the spawn of Satan, but they are gullible children who are being misled by their evil leaders' secret agenda and Fox News.  Most commenters, however, dismiss all the information Luntz tries to give them about their opponents and express considerable resentment for having been exposed to it in the first place, especially at their beloved WaPo, where they are not accustomed to having to encounter such things.

Update:  It's occurred to me that a point about asymmetry depends on showing that the same thing doesn't happen all the time in reverse.  I've been hunting for some "Top 10 Stupid Things Conservatives Believe About Liberals" articles, published in conservative venues, that elicited purely conservative backlashes along the lines of:  "We don't believe you espouse any such benign motives behind your revolting slogans.  Our caricatures were actually quite accurate.  Everyone knows the root of your insane liberal beliefs is that you're paid Communist operatives.  The author of this piece is a smelly hippie."  I haven't been able to find any, but maybe some of you can link to them in the comments.  I did find some "Top 10 Dumb Conservative Beliefs" posts, but no comparable reader response.  Mostly they were explanations that liberals don't really hate America or the troops or family values, and don't intend to encourage personal irresponsibility, etc., with reader responses that were mild or mixed.  I admit that I have participated in more than one argument among conservatives that degenerated into the blanket explanation that all liberal initiatives were Alinsky-style tactics intended to destroy the country.  I just haven't seen that approach adopted unanimously in the comments section of a major newspaper in response to an "olive branch" style of op-ed piece.

New things are fun only if you're a predator

From Nicole Cliff at The Hairpin, via Never Yet Melted via Maggie's Farm:

If you haven't spent a lot of time around horses, you may have the idea that they are like dogs and cats (really big, dangerous dogs and cats). This is untrue. YOU are like dogs and cats, in that you are a predator. . . .  [I]f someone says to you "hey, let's try this new brunch place that has amazing cocktails," there's a decent chance you'll say "great, meet you there." Your dog feels similarly. New things are fun! That is because you are a predator. . . . If you try to take your horse to a new brunch place, you need to convince them that a) you've been there before, b) there are no cave trolls at the brunch place, c) there will be other horses at the brunch place, and d) you will be a royal pain in their ass until they quit dicking around and agree to go to the brunch place.

Husbands can be similar.

Outlaw!

He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Hangover,” “Gran Torino” and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas.  “Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.... 

“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law. 

“If I were younger,” he added, “maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow.”

Well, you know, even if you were younger they'd have to get it past a jury.

Fun with nomenclature

"Warming Hole Delayed Climate Change Over Eastern United States," declares the headline at Science Daily, describing the results of new studies from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).  It seems that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a regional "warming hole," a/k/a a cold patch, a/k/a a place where the global warming model was an abject failure for many decades.

It seems to me you could as easily say "we found a large area where global warming didn't happen, thus confounding our expectations and making us question our causation theory."  Or you might say "particulate pollution appears to be a stronger driver of climate change than the oft-reviled CO2, and in the opposite direction, so now we're really confused about that positive-feedback assumption on which most of our alarming predictions are based."  You might even say "particulate pollution paradoxically acts as a benign umbrella to protect industrialized regions from global warming," but what fun would that be?  A "Warming Hole" sounds a lot scarier and more interesting.  Who wants to crucify industry barons who are only spreading a lovely parasol?  And what respectable science journal wants to run a story about counter-evidence for global warming causation theories?

Like most of the announcements in this area, the new report is based on re-jiggered models, in this case a "combination of two complex models of Earth systems."  That's terrific.  The only thing that inspires more confidence than a complex model is two of them jammed together.

In Washington, It's Always 1945

Another good American Enterprise Institute review, courtesy of Maggie's Farm (which by the way is also the source of my last two posts). Nick interviews Jim Manzi about his book "Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society," in which he laments public policy that has not been subjected to controlled experiments.  Manzi argues that our political leaders can't shake the mindset they acquired after World War II, when the U.S. had half the world's GDP:

Our almost casual disregard for the erosion of the foundations of our political economy — endless talk but little successful action on internationally uncompetitive K-12 educational results; a widely touted university system that produces more visual and performing arts graduates than math, biology, or engineering graduates; an immigration policy that all but ignores the need to upgrade our human capital; underinvestment in certain kinds of infrastructure, science, and technology; the relentlessly rising tide of social dysfunction among the majority of the American population that does not graduate from college; somehow convincing ourselves that we are uniquely responsible for maintaining global order, when we represent only about 25 percent of global economic output; a continuous trade deficit for more than 30 years; federal government debt of 70 percent of GDP, without any real prospect of achieving fiscal balance, never mind running the budget surpluses that would be required to pay it down, and so on — is shocking and profligate. . . .  The United States can thrive in this new world, but is not destined to do so.

Manzi doesn't oppose reform; he merely advocates federalism:

My argument is not that we should avoid reforms. To the contrary, it is that we should attempt many more potential reforms by trying them out on a small scale to see how they really work.

Cash Now!

"It's your money, use it when you want it" -- so goes the late-night J.G. Wentworth TV commercial aimed at beneficiaries of "structured settlements," which are basically annuities paid over time.  You can cash out one of these settlements for a lump sum, but obviously at a discount.  Alex J. Pollock at the American Enterprise Institute asks if you'd take 80 cents on the dollar for your expectation of Social Security benefits.  Would I?  Does the Pope have lips?

The problem, of course, is that it's not your money.  It's not even money.  It doesn't exist at all.  So on that basis, heck, I'd take 10 cents on the dollar and feel like a successful bandit.

The limits of scientism

John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, has an interesting review of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" in The New Republic.  He admires the book in many ways, but argues that Haidt suffers from provincialism (he's hung up on American notions of the left/right split in politics) and from the usual limitations of a faith in scientism.  In Gray's view, Haidt's newest work is a sophisticated example of "attractively simple theories that [are believed to be] invested with the power of overcoming moral and political difficulties that have so far proved intractable."

Gray gives Haidt credit for overcoming the recently voguish "primitive type of rationalism" that so often ignores the strength and value of our irrational or extra-rational nature; he acknowledges that the conscious mind is like a rider on a strong, beautiful animal.  Still, he faults Haidt for his emphasis on group morality:

Understanding morality as a group phenomenon neglects the fact that human groups are complex, historically shifting, and internally conflicted. Tribes and nations are not natural kinds of things like genes and blood types. They are historical constructions whose existence depends on human recognition. Human beings rarely, if ever, belong to only one group. One of the tasks of morality is to arbitrate the clashing loyalties that regularly arise from the many group identities that human beings possess. In some cases, morality may lead people to put aside group loyalties altogether.

Gray also argues that Haidt's functionalist definition of morality leaves him in a number of unresolved difficulties:

There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign.

Gray cautions against Haidt's naive confidence that evolutionary psychology can resolve the conflict between utilitarianism and pluralism:

Issues such as abortion and gay marriage are not bitterly disputed because legislators have failed to apply a utilitarian calculus. They are bitterly disputed because a substantial part of the population rejects utilitarian ethics. . . . .  Haidt appears not to grasp the importance of the fact that intuitionism and utilitarianism are rivals, and not only in moral philosophy. They are also at odds in practice. Making public policies on a basis of utilitarian reasoning requires a high degree of convergence, not diversity, in moral intuitions. Such policies will not be accepted as legitimate if they violate deep-seated and widely held intuitions regarding, for example, sexuality and the sanctity of human life. . . .  Once again seemingly unaware of the depth of the problems he is addressing, Haidt tells us that such conflicts will not arise, or else they will be soon overcome, as long as people are brought together in the right way.

A good review should either warn you not to waste your time, or inspire you to acquire the book and spend time ploughing through it. This review is tipping me toward the investment of time and effort.

An Article for Eric Blair

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a new book on Rome.  As always, I'll defer to Eric for a read on the quality of the thing; Rome is his bailiwick.

"The Better Half"

Here's a cheerful song about finding the good in a hard life, built around friendly lyrics and a playful arrangement.

"Suicide Doors"

Popular Mechanics has a delightful article called "The 13 Most Dangerous Car Interiors in History."  Runner up is the Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.

"Suicide doors" got their name for a reason. Many early cars didn't have locking doors, door latches opened by pressing downward, and a downward-opening latch often served as an armrest. It was a recipe for catastrophe. Without a seatbelt, anyone chilling in the back of a car with rear-swinging doors could easily fall out, especially since the wind would catch the door and blow it open. The gorgeous 1961 Lincoln Continental had suicide rear doors, harking back to a much earlier era of coachbuilt luxury cars of the 1920s.

That happens to be the subject of a pretty great rockabilly song by the Reverend Horton Heat.

Women & World Peace

Foreign Policy has an article that claims that the best predictor of a state's stability is how it treats its women.

What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies. 

Our findings, detailed in our new book out this month, Sex and World Peace, echo those of other scholars, who have found that the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts, and to resort to higher levels of violence....  

It's ironic that authors such as Steven Pinker who claim that the world is becoming much more peaceful have not recognized that violence against women in many countries is, if anything, becoming more prevalent, not less so, and dwarfs the violence produced through war and armed conflict. To say a country is at peace when its women are subject to femicide -- or to ignore violence against women while claiming, as Pinker does, that the world is now more secure -- is simply oxymoronic.

Well, Pinker's argument is one I don't think much of myself (we discussed it here); nevertheless, I'm not sure what to make of this argument.

Stability as such isn't much of a goal, if what is being stabilized is injustice.  Thus, to some degree, you would think it would be a good thing to see that states that are fundamentally unjust were also unstable:  that's just what we might think we would want to see.

On the other hand, growing instability doesn't seem to improve the situation for women much:  in fact, it seems to worsen it.

It seems probable that they have their causality exactly backwards.  Good treatment for women does not cause political stability; it seems to result from it.  It is in a stable atmosphere that women have often done best in human history, because it is in such an atmosphere that the traditional male advantages are minimized:  size, strength, and a mental structure that evolution has shaped for war.  In a stable environment, it is development of long-term relationships rather than combat that tends to shape society:  and these are traditional female strengths.  It's the periods of long-term prosperity and stability in which women have advanced their political and legal position.

This suggests that if you want to see women's treatment improve, you should work to stabilize society; but you will almost certainly be stabilizing an oppressive environment for the women when you do it.  The goods that come for women will come from their own work and their own natural strength, over time, not because of external efforts.

Nevertheless, there are some counterexamples to the theory that occur to me.  It would have been true during the height of the instability of the industrial age, for example, that women had greatest equality (if not best treatment) in the places rendered most unstable by the revolution; and likewise, in WWII, it was the instability that created the opportunity for large-scale female migration into factory work.

This set of data suggest that creating instability is a great thing to do insofar as it gives women a greater hand in the means of production, which may only be possible in industrialized or post-industrial societies.  It was certainly true that many Marxist revolutions promised women this very good if they would join the revolution and help overthrow the government, which is why many third-world Marxist leaders were women.  However, after the revolution the promised goods rarely materialized.

If this is the truth, though, then there's no general rule about correlation or causation to be made here.  The fact that stable states are correlated with female rights is true only just now; it was not true before, and might not be true later.

The authors would like it to be true that the correlation (and even the causation) ran in their direction, because it could allow us to avoid making a value judgment between stability and freedom for women.  In fact, I suspect we will often have to make such judgments:  and I am as ready to strike a blow for freedom today as I ever was, though experience has made me less hopeful about how much we can actually achieve in our own historical moment.

"Counsel, do you have any other arguments?"

These are not words a lawyer wants to hear from the bench, especially if his only honest answer is, "Your Honor, I got nuthin'."

Arguments before the Supreme Court this week on the Arizona immigration law went far worse than I ever imagined they would, in part because I haven't been playing close attention to the exact position of the federal government.  I did not realize, for instance, that federal law already permits local police to check the immigration status of a person they suspect of being an illegal alien.  Arizona's law merely makes such a check mandatory.  The purpose of the change apparently was to permit the state authorities to override local preferences for annulling the federal immigration laws; in other words, this law works out a conflict between state and municipal authorities, not between state and federal authorities.

I also did not realize that the government stipulated at the outset that it was offering no arguments about the danger of profiling.  The law itself is race-neutral, so any such argument from the DOJ would have to await the implementation of the state law and the application of the usual statistical tests.  There may come a day when we have to endure "disparate impact" arguments on this subject, but today is not that day.

Remarks from the Justices amply demonstrated how badly the federal government's arguments were faring, but some of the worst came from moderate Justice Kennedy, from new, presumptively liberal Justice Sotomayor, and even from obviously liberal Justice Breyer.  Breyer asked how a provision that would require policemen call to check immigration status can be said to conflict with a federal rule that allows policemen to call to check immigration status.  Sotomayor got the DOJ to admit that the state would merely alert the feds that they'd discovered an illegal alien; nothing Arizona is doing (or could do) would require the feds to take the aliens into custody, if they didn't feel that doing so was a high priority or worth the expense.  (I'd just expect the feds to set up an automated message system that no one ever checks.  "Press one if you're wasting our time with more reports of illegal aliens, you red-state poster-children for hate crimes.")  Justice Kennedy's question was even more devastating: "So you're saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?"  And as has been so widely reported, Justice Roberts stated, "It seems to me that the Federal Government just doesn't want to know who is here illegally or not."  But none of the Justices was impressed by the argument that federal pre-emption means the states are prohibited from giving the feds information they'd prefer not to know.

I don't know of any precedent for this situation, where the feds want to keep a law on the books, then claim pre-emption over the issue whether it will be enforced as written.  As Justice Scalia pointed out:

Anyway, what's wrong about the states enforcing Federal law? There is a Federal law against robbing Federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks? I think it is. But does the Attorney General come in and say, you know, we might really only want to go after the professional bank robbers? If it's just an amateur bank robber, you know, we're going to let it go. And the state's interfering with our whole scheme here because it's prosecuting all these bank robbers.