Venerean transit

Even rarer than a Diamond Jubilee is a transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, which (weather permitting) we should get a chance to see near sundown on Tuesday, June 5.  Grab that chance, for you won't likely get another.  Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, a transit occurs only on the infrequent occasions when a celestial object passes between the Earth and the Sun just when the slightly tilted planes of the orbits of the Earth and the other body intersect at a "node."  In the case of Venus, with its 225-day "year," things line up properly according to a 243-year cycle, during which there are a pair of transits about 8 years apart.  Because the last transit occurred in 2004, Earth residents won't see another one until well into the 22nd century.  In ordinary years, Venus will pass the Sun as many as 18 solar diameters above or below, casting no shadow.  (I don't remember hearing a word about the 2004 transit, do you?)

Watching a transit of Venus, like watching a solar eclipse, requires care to avoid eye injury.  Most darkened glasses are considered insufficient.  The safest and easiest viewing results from watching an image projected through a tiny pinprick in paper.  As you can see from the picture, however, the disk of shadow is quite small.  Better viewing probably can be found in a planned NASA webcast.

Though the first documented awareness of a visible transit across the face of the Sun was in the 17th century, ancient cultures have tracked the orbit of Venus for millennia.  Beginning in about 1200 B.C., Babylonian astronomers noticed the regular patterns of the heavenly bodies and produced star catalogues.  By the 7th century B.C., they had produced a careful chart of the risings and settings of Venus over a period of 21 years, perhaps the earliest evidence of an understanding of the periodicity of planetary phenomena.  The Babylonians seem to have concentrated on periods and prediction without developing a spatial, geometric model for the movement of the planets.  It fell to the Hellenistic Greeks to postulate ideal circular motions.  An early 3rd century B.C. astronomer named Aristarchus is said to have been the first to deduce that the Earth spins around its own axis while rotating around the sun.  Although his arguments persuaded a 2nd century B.C.  Chaldean astronomer named Seleucus, most of the ancient world, including Aristotle and Ptolemy, adopted a geocentric model that persisted for over a thousand years.

The geocentric model was supported by careful observations that permitted surprisingly good predictions of the location and timing of astronomical events.  It suffered from two serious drawbacks, however.  First, the planets were required to inscribe all kinds of complicated little circles within circles ("epicycles") in order to conform to astronomical observations of periodic retrograde motion.  These epicycles were not so much errors as unnecessary complications resulting from adopting an extremely inconvenient point of reference.  Copernicus solved the "wheels within wheels" problem in the 16th century A.D. by returning to the heliocentric model that never should have been abandoned in the first place.  Unfortunately, his model could not improve on the Ptolemaic predictions because of the second drawback in both systems:  the over-simplified assumption that planetary motions were the perfect circles that all right-thinking people considered essential for dignified celestial bodies.  As a result, even the more open-minded authorities were slow to jettison the old geocentric model.  Johannes Kepler soon solved that problem by figuring out in the early 17th century that the orbits must be elliptical, with the sun at one focus of the ellipse.  (At about this same time, Galileo Galilei was using the brand-new telescope to discover that Jupiter had its own moons in orbit around itself, and that Venus showed phases just like the Earth's moon, suggesting that it orbited the sun rather than orbiting the Earth.)  It fell to Kepler, with his unprecedented grasp of the mathematical underpinnings of orbital mechanics, to make a successful prediction of a transit of Venus, in 1631, which went a long way toward conferring respectability on the new-fangled model.

Galileo conducted careful experiments with falling bodies and figured out that objects near Earth followed parabolic trajectories, in which the lateral movement varied directly with time but the vertical movement varied with time squared.  It did not occur to him, however, or to anyone else, apparently, to connect this mathematical pattern with the movements of the planets.  It required the incomparable genius of Isaac Newton, late in the 17th century, to connect the two in a single law of gravitation.  He is famously supposed to have considered the falling of an apple from a tree in conjunction with the Moon hanging overhead, and to have imagined stretching the curving path of a thrown object until it could stay aloft all the way around the horizon and describe a full orbit.  All these motions, whether of apples or planets, are varieties of what we now call conic sections:  the shapes that can be derived geometrically from the essential characteristic of an inverse square law, including circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas.

• Circle:  x² + y² = r²
• Ellipse:  x² / a² + y² / b² = 1
• Parabola:  x = y²
• Hyperbola:  x² / a² - y² / b² = 1

The heliocentric view has not been an unalloyed popular success.  Polls still show that something like a fifth of the population believes the sun revolves around the Earth.  Chances are, the transit of Venus won't change their minds.

Diamond Jubilee

The Queen of England celebrates her Diamond Jubilee this weekend, the first since Queen Victoria's.  That one occasioned Kipling's Recessional, so recently quoted here.  I wish to remind readers of the Hall of the reason why we have cause to love this particular woman.  We must never forget...

....that this queen had the Coldstream Guards play "The Star Spangled Banner" at Buckingham Palace after 9/11; or that she sang it, herself and from memory, at a religious ceremony not long after.

Nor should we forget the faithful friendship of Her Majesty's armed forces in the nearly eleven years of war that have followed.  Here are some members of those armed forces performing for her on her 85th birthday.



The author of that piece wrote another famous song.  Already Kipling's prophecy has caught that one.



May our British friends have good kings and queens in the years to come.  On this occasion, congratulations, ma'am.

Mark the Jews

CUNY has an idea.

Touting a move to make its faculty more diverse, CUNY administrators have broken out Jews into a separate minority group: “White/Jewish.”

Two questions:

1)  How does CUNY "make its faculty more diverse" by changing how the same set of people are labeled?

2)  Why wouldn't Jews want to be clearly labeled?  It's not like this is some unheard-of reform that's never been tried before.

Actually, one more question:  how do we mark Sammy Davis, Jr.?

Hackers

Can nation-states really produce scarier malware than unaffiliated geeks?  While the Iranian nuclear program continues to struggle with the setbacks imposed by Stuxnet, a new and even more imposing program has been discovered infiltrating the Middle East.  "Flame" has a number of modules, including this impressive function:

Among Flame’s many modules is one that turns on the internal microphone of an infected machine to secretly record conversations that occur either over Skype or in the computer’s near vicinity; a module that turns Bluetooth-enabled computers into a Bluetooth beacon, which scans for other Bluetooth-enabled devices in the vicinity to siphon names and phone numbers from their contacts folder; and a module that grabs and stores frequent screenshots of activity on the machine, such as instant-messaging and e-mail communications, and sends them via a covert SSL channel to the attackers’ command-and-control servers.

I feel we're in a period much like the dawn of the antibiotic age, with doctors stumbling around trying out brand-new strategies to fight naive pathogens. H/t, again, Rocket Science.

Latrines, taboos, vulgarity, and the Internet

Some scholarly articles are unusually rich in detail.  Who knew that a medieval cure for bed-wetting was to feed the offender with ground hedgehog, while "among the Dahomeans of West Africa repeat offenders had a live frog attached to their waist to shock them into self-mastery"?

The anthropology of physical elimination is rich.  One cited researcher proposes a link between intolerant societies and their marginal control of excretion-borne health threats:

Recently it has even been argued that cross-national differences in closed-mindedness and intolerance are excretion-related:  countries with higher levels of parasite stress, associated psychologically with disgust and materially with poor sanitation, are less likely to have robust democracies, individual freedom, equitable distribution of economic resources and gender equality (Thornhill et al., 2009).

Another interesting link may be found between the rise of the internet and the decline of robust "latrinalia":

Arguably in the internet age there is little point writing taboo thoughts on bathroom walls: why scribble for a meagre one-at-a-time audience when you can make equally vulgar anonymous comments on a public discussion board or chatroom?

H/t Rocket Science.

The hand weaver and the factory maid

AVI's posting of a Steeleye Span song led me, as such things often do, to a YouTube jaunt.  Here is a song about the social dislocations of the industrial revolution:  a hand-weaving man's girlfriend has become a factory maid who no longer wants to let him into her bedroom at night.  It's always been one of my favorite Steeleye Span productions, not only for the way Maddy Pryor alternates with the instruments between the primary and secondary tunes, but for the glorious a cappella ending chorus, with her terrific voice tripled in tracks.  The YouTube notes suggest that this is a mashup of at least three traditional songs.  The uploader provided appropriate images of looms and fabrics.



Oh, when I was a tailor, I carried my bodkin and shears. 
When I was a weaver, I carried my roods and my gear. 
My temples also, my smallclothes and reed in my hand. 
And wherever I go, there's the jolly bold weaver again.


I'm a hand weaver to me trade; I fell in love with a factory maid. 
And if I could but her favor win, I'd stand beside her and weave by steam.


Me father to me scornful said, "How could you marry a factory maid? 
When you could have girls fine and gay, dressed like unto the Queen of May?"


"As for your fine girls, I don't care. If I could but enjoy my dear, 
I'd stand in the factory all the day, and she and I would keep our shuttles in play."


I went to my love's bedroom door, where oftentimes I had been before. 
But I could not speak nor yet get in the pleasant bed where my love lay in.


"How can you say it's a pleasant bed, when nought lies there but a factory maid?" 
"A factory lass although she be, blessed is the man that enjoys she."


Oh, pleasant thoughts run through me mind, as I turn down her sheets so fine 
And see her two breasts standing so, like two white hills all covered with snow.


The loom goes click and the loom goes clack 
The shuttle flies forward and then flies back 
The weaver's so bent that he's like to crack 
Such a wearisome trade is the weaver's.

The yarn is made into cloth at last 
The ends of weft they are made quite fast 
The weaver's labors are now all passed 
Such a wearisome trade is the weaver's.


Where are the girls?  I will tell you plain: The girls have all gone to weave by steam, 
And if you'd find them you must rise at dawn, and trudge to the mill in the early morn.

Union

I survived the wedding festivities and have only to show you all now how lovely my young niece was.  My niece the doktah.  She's a tiny thing, barely over five feet tall.  She had not one single bridezilla moment, but took everything completely in stride, with that 1,000-watt smile going the whole time.  There was a terrific Irish band and lots of singing and dancing of jigs.

My sister lost (!!) the first ribbon I crocheted for the bride's bouquet, but I made another and brought it with me. The lost one resurfaced today. I figure now my niece has two, which is a good start on a christening outfit.

Killer shoes on the bride:

Oh, yes, I guess there was a groom, too.  That's him on the right, his older brother on the left, and my father's longtime physics colleague between them.  The groom's family were as charming a group of Irishmen as you'd ever hope to meet, and very fine dancers and toast-givers.

The Good Old Days

Once upon a time, the CIA used to wage cultural and psychological warfare against communists and other baleful influences.  Of course, so did their foes:  the USSR had a far more expansive program than is commonly known.  They had the insight to fund, not poetry reviews or high-culture magazines, but straight news:  and to arrange to provide that news for free in third world countries.

I guess the USSR method has been the more enduring, although it has passed from governments to interstate actors.

How the Catholic Bishops Should Fight

This woman has an excellent grasp of the strategic situation.

Withdrawing health insurance (like Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio), shutting down schools, closing adoption agencies, soup kitchens or ANYTHING ELSE in "protest" of ObamaCare and the HHS "mandates" is EXACTLY, PRECISELY, TOTALLY and COMPLETELY what the Obama regime wants.... 

Listen, you fools. YOU DON'T SHUT ANYTHING DOWN. You keep going exactly as you have been, and you force those dirty rotten SOBs to literally storm your hospitals and shut YOU down at gunpoint. And I'm not kidding. Make them physically shut down your hospital by dragging you out at gunpoint. Make them physically shut down your schools. Make them shut down your university by force because you won't cover abortions in your student health plan. Make them physically shut down your soup kitchens. Make them shut down your adoption agencies[.]

My sense is that the response to shutting down Catholic hospitals, etc., will be for the government to sigh pitiably and say, "Well, that just goes to show why something as important as hospitals/schools/adoption services can only be entrusted to the government."  That's what they wanted anyway:  government to have unquestioned and unlimited authority over this sphere of life.

On the other hand, defiance of the law -- justified because it is a gross violation of the principle of religious freedom, and remains so regardless of the decision of the courts -- forces the government to shut you down.  Let the people see armed Federal agents shutting down hospices and nunneries and orphanages.  Let the people see that the principle of free birth control and abortion is worth that much to the government.

The Kangaroo Stalks at Midnight

Apparently some of those marsupials can have malice aforethought....

A hostile kangaroo launched a savage assault on a mother after spending two days stalking her - then attacked her husband as she recovered in hospital.

Now that's an interesting concept, being stalked by a kangaroo.  Have they finally gotten rid of all the rifles in Australia, then?

In Defense of Skinner

Mentioned in our recent discussion of A Clockwork Orange, B. F. Skinner is one of the least-beloved figures of modern history.  A new article argues that we've got him all wrong.

[His study] turned out to be the crowded basement sanctum of an inveterate tinkerer and gadget guy. Lacking WiFi and Bluetooth in his office, Skinner had jury-rigged strings and all sorts of wooden and cardboard doodads that enabled him to tweak his environment from his desk chair: by hiding the face of a clock he found himself watching, or by turning on a tape recorder that inspired him to organize his thoughts. 

Though more advanced in execution, today’s electronic nudges and tweaks are identical in purpose: use what you can control to affect what you can’t. The simple elegance of this concept flips on its head Chomsky’s suggestion that behavior modification treats people as if they were no more intelligent than animals. What distinguishes our intellect from animals’ is not that we can go against our environment—most of us can’t, not in the long run—but rather that we can purposefully alter our environment to shape our behavior in ways we choose.

Pause and consider; and then we can discuss.

One thing about history. There's always more of it.



Wikipedia article on the Cristero War. (Because I know nobody has ever heard of this.)

There's No Duck, Though....

You may remember this clever political theory from 2008.

I presented to an anxiously waiting world a Meta Theory of Recent Presidential Elections, encapsulated by the idea that “Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.”... 

The Bugs-Daffy frame is another way of saying that ever since the dawn of television put the public personalities of candidates front and center, the one who is more comfortable in his or her own skin always prevails against the more uptight, rigid foe.

The model has a lot to offer, when you have candidates who basically fit the models.  Romney, whatever else he is, is not much like Daffy Duck.

No, I think another rule of Warner Brothers applies to this race:  "The Turtle Always Wins."

Memorial Day

On occasions like this, I always feel like it is impossible to say what needs to be said.  I am always afraid of leaving unsaid the most important thing, through lack of wit; and my wits are worse this year, for illness and lack of sleep.

So I will trust to music to say what I cannot think to say, and to the judgment of trusted companions.

Via the BSBFB:

Via Phil, at Lars Walker's place:

Via BLACKFIVE:

That last one's not just music, but it's got good history and a pretty solid time-on-target airstrike at the end.  That last hit was a little late, but the rest of them are inside the three-second standard.

Horseback Riding

Oh, for goodness sake.

[Ann Romney's dressage trainer] Mr. Ebeling was at ease with the wealthy women drawn to the sport of dressage, in which horses costing up to seven figures execute pirouettes and other dancelike moves for riders wearing tails and top hats.

Well, OK, "up to."  Remember those posts about the Dawsonville Pool Room from a little while back?  Well, just down the road is Unicorn Valley Farm, run by a nice lady named Carol.  She has horses to sell from around eight hundred bucks up to a few thousand, and will break and train them six days a week for you for $720 a month.  If you can't afford a horse but still want to learn, she'll cheaply lease you time on one who knows dressage already.  If you do that, or if you already own a horse who knows, the price for human beginners is forty bucks a month.  For all of these prices, if you don't have that much money but you or your kids know how to shovel out a horse stall, there's a discount.

She used to sponsor the equine club for the local high school, until the recession hurt her enough that she couldn't afford to give that much time and money to charity any more.  Even so, I can promise you that there are a lot of poor girls from Dawson County who know more about dressage than Ann Romney.  Nothing against Mrs. Romney:  but I've seen some of them ride.

The High Feste of Pentecoste

Today is the day to swear again the old oath.

[Arthur] charged them never to do outrage nor murder, and always to flee treason; and to give mercy unto him that asked mercy, upon pain of forfeit of their worship and the lordship of king Arthur; and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows service, to strengthen them in their rights, and never to force them, upon pain of death. Also, that no man fight a duel they knew was wrong, neither for love nor for worldly gain. So unto this were all knights sworn who were of the Table Round, both old and young. "And every yere so were the[y] swome at the high feste of Pentecoste."

Pentecost was the day when the Grail Quest began, which destroyed the might of the Round Table.  The Grail visited Arthur's table at the feast, and then passed away again.  Instead of accepting the grace offered, they quested after it as if they could win it by their own valor and worthiness, and so were destroyed.

Pentecost is the right day for that message.  Before the time of the apostles it had been the feast of firstfruits.  If early spring represents the return of fertility, early summer allows us to see the first children that come of that renewed fertility.  It is the first nourishment that comes to us after the winter.  There remains a long summer ahead before the full harvest -- summer was the hungry time, in the middle ages.  Yet here is a first taste of grace, and a promise of greater grace to come.

Arthur did not go on the quest for the Grail, but stayed true to his duty to keep the walls of this world.

And therewith the king said: Ah, knight Sir Launcelot, I require thee thou counsel me, for I would that this quest were undone, an it might be Sir, said Sir Launcelot, ye saw yesterday so many worthy knights that then were sworn that they may not leave it in no manner of wise. That wot I well, said the king, but it shall so heavy me at their departing that I wot well there shall no manner of joy remedy me. And then the king and the queen went unto the minster. So anon Launcelot and Gawaine commanded their men to bring their arms. And when they all were armed save their shields and their helms, then they came to their fellowship, which were all ready in the same wise, for to go to the minster to hear their service...

And then they put on their helms and departed, and recommended them all wholly unto the queen; and there was weeping and great sorrow. Then the queen departed into her chamber and held her, so that no man should perceive her great sorrows. When Sir Launcelot missed the queen he went till her chamber, and when she saw him she cried aloud: O Launcelot, Launcelot, ye have betrayed me and put me to the death, for to leave thus my lord.

It is a grave question that troubles me every year:  is it right to go on the quest, or is it not?  Lancelot holds that it is better to die in that quest than in any other fashion.  Death is sure to us all, but the suffering of the quest prepares and purifies the spirit, so that it might be a little less unfit for the presence of God.

Arthur holds to his duty to keep the space in this world in which joy is possible, and trust in the coming of the later grace.  So he held Camelot, and the peace of the land and the people, while his knights broke themselves in the wilderness.

Ave, gallus gallus

A Smithsonian article traces the 10,000-year-old domestication of these descendants of the dinosaurs by their upstart rivals, the mammals.  Modern chickens probably sprang from a northeast Indian red junglefowl, but there may have been a yellow-skinned gray-feathered relative from southern India in the woodpile as well.  By 2,000 B.C., chickens had spread to Mesopotamia.  Homer does not mention them, but chickens became quite popular with the later Greeks and Romans, who appreciated the handiness of an animal whose slaughter produced just enough meat for a moderate household for a day.  Polynesian seafarers may have introduced them to South America in pre-Columbian times.  Today, Americans alone eat nine billion chickens a year, while KFC has opened more than 3,000 outlets in mainland China in just the last 25 years.

From Santeria to Jewish mothers to General Tso, this article is encyclopedic.  And now I'm inspired to enjoy some of my husband's superb fried chicken, left over from last night, for Sunday dinner.  Tomorrow, I hit the road for Philadelphia, there to attend my niece's wedding.

Memorial

These pipers are not from a military service but from the intimate, traditional, and highly satisfying memorial service we gave to honor my aunt on Friday.  Still, they seem an appropriate image for this weekend.  Like Grim, I have been ailing significantly (I hope he doesn't have the ugly bug I caught), and am just now creeping out among the living after a week of needing an hour's nap to recover from every ten minutes spent vertical.  I'm getting old.  The obituary notices of my contemporaries, or even their children, are starting to come with astounding regularity, another just this weekend.  A Memorial weekend indeed.

There's nothing like pipes at a funeral.  The snare drum was an indispensable addition as well.  We stuck to the King James version of the service, not only to suit my stodgy tastes but in honor of my old-fashioned aunt, who was born in 1915 and never really got used to the modernized Book of Common Prayer.  Doris Elizabeth Kilpatrick Watts, R.I.P.

Memorial Day Weekend

I want to wish all of you a happy Memorial Day weekend.  I continue to be rather ill this weekend, and thus must regret that I am unable to do due honor to those who ought to be remembered.  However, my good brothers at BLACKFIVE are busy.

All the best to all of you, as you remember.  By coincidence tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost; I will try to have something for that.  Otherwise, you may not see much of me for a few more days.

A Glimpse of the Death of the Law

There's either a lot to be said about this story, or almost nothing.  I'm going to go with the latter because a lot of ink has been spilled on it today, and maybe you should just read it if you haven't so far.

I'll say only three things.

Knowingly falsely sending a SWAT team to someone's house should be prosecuted as attempted murder.  The team in this case was apparently entirely professional, and nobody got hurt:  but things turn out otherwise so often when such teams are used that we ought to prosecute it as an attempt to kill the target.  In the case that someone is actually killed by one of these false reports, it should be prosecuted as premeditated murder.

One of the things I did in the war that I feel best about was that, for a while toward the end of my time there, the intel shop would ask me before executing raids on tribal targets for whom they had actionable intelligence.  Very often I could talk them through how the 'informant' proved to be from another tribe with an active beef, while the target of the raid was a highly ranked member of the tribe to be raided.  If they could talk us into it, we would detain or kill one of their enemy's key leaders, while also driving a wedge between US forces and their enemy tribe.  That was very hard to do, though, and there's no reason to believe it can be replicated here. We really need to rethink whether having so many SWAT teams in America is a good idea, or whether commando-style teams ought to be used for so many purposes.  Now that this firewall has been breached, and the tactic has made it here, we need to give careful thought to where, and indeed to whether, such a team is really appropriate.

Finally, Patterico has a screen capture of a message from one of his enemies.  Allow me to suggest that the wrong part is bolded.

That is not the worst-case scenario.  The worst-case scenario is that you convince ordinary reasonable and rational people that the law can no longer protect decent people, but that the courts have been captured to serve the interests of the wicked.  This is a very high-risk strategy, and not only for the people engaged in it.

If it becomes widely used it also represents a potentially fatal risk to the authority of the courts.  Jurists and legislators had better find a way to take this threat seriously, and institute controls to prevent their institutions being captured for such purposes.

Phalanx

The following is a South Korean training video.  It shows some remarkable infantry tactics, a kind of update of ancient infantry tactics.  South Korean protests get rather unruly, as the video may suggest.



Note the flanking maneuver from 2:33-3:20 or  so, where a wing of the enemy is cut off and destroyed (presumably in this case, they would merely be arrested).  Also the use of a kind of pure-infantry bounding overwatch from 5:30-7:00.  This allows them to advance against significant resistance, including incendiaries, and capture territory while maintaining formation.

Malum in Se

Cassandra has a post by this title today, treating some of the abuses currently coming to light.  It is starting to seem like there is a new example every day.  I hope she is right that people of good will can come together.

The Real Numbers

USA Today has been on this story for years, and they deserve credit for continuing to make the point and bring it back around to our attention every so often.  One of the things that a robust journalism should do is bring these kinds of major national issues to our attention when the powerful are trying to hide the scale of the problem.

If you applied corporate accounting rules to Federal spending, we'd see that our current budget deficit is over five trillion dollars a year.  To balance the budget at current spending rates, the average American family would need to fork over almost its entire income in Federal tax alone.

That doesn't speak to the state crises, which are not limited to California.  This is just the Federal problem.

However, that's just the scale for this year.  Look at the bigger picture:

Federal debt and retiree commitments equal $561,254 per household. By contrast, an average household owes a combined $116,057 for mortgages, car loans and other debts.

Well, so the average American household is $677,000 in debt.  What's the average net worth of an American household?  It's a lot higher than I would have thought -- $434,000 and change.  (The median net worth is much closer to what I would have expected, but there are a certain number of very rich people out there).

So that's just an extra $137,000 that the average household needs to earn in its lifetime, and things will be ducky.  (That is, the $561,000 in 'extra' debt you don't know you have, minus average net worth, which already considers the average $116,000 in ordinary debt.)  After you fork that over, you can start getting ahead.

Arming Law-Enforcement Drones

A deputy sheriff in Texas has a suggestion:  how about we arm drones with rubber bullets and tear gas?

Charles Krauthammer has a response:



Oh, wait, sorry.  Mr. Krauthammer's actual wording can be read here.

The Problem of Disgust

Some time ago we talked about Dr. Martha Nussbaum's thoughts on disgust.  We shouldn't allow disgust to be a standard for making laws, she says, because it is an irrational standard, and it leaves us likely to pass unfair laws discriminating against people whom we (irrationally) find disgusting.

What she's really arguing is that feelings of the type broadly called disgust are often purely irrational, and not therefore good reasons for rules. Why not? A minimum standard for 'a good reason' is that it should be based on reason, which by definition isn't purely irrational. Indeed, most modern thinkers would say it should be purely rational -- but I don't think that's right, for as we've discussed, the ancient notion of reason was able to embrace both the true and the beautiful.... 

The feeling of disgust does occur in children learning about sex, and also in India when some castes ponder the untouchables, and also in a wide variety of other cases. Some of this may be purely irrational; other things (like the reaction when seeing a person with a serious deformity) has an underlying reason we can grasp (a revulsion of that type might have helped our ancestors avoid a serious disease), but it is one that is irrelevant or useless in modern life. Furthermore, in acting out of disgust of this type, we are failing to treat those people who are 'untouchable' or afflicted with a deformity with the respect due to human beings. 

That far, at least, her argument is surely a reasonable one: indeed, it's an argument which is wholly compatible with what the Judeo-Christian ethos that the reviewer is defending. This very principle is what took saints in to live among lepers. 

The problem with following her approach is that disgust -- pure or otherwise -- is a powerful motivator.  It's a thing like pain in that it creates an aversion in the person experiencing it.  To license it is to put a powerful weapon in the hands of the kind of bullies that occupy too much of our public space.

Today's example comes from Hustler magazine, which took a photograph of a young conservative journalist named S. E. Cupp and modified it in a way clearly designed to disgust her -- most people would be disgusted by being portrayed this way in public, in any case.  The text accompanying the photo clearly label it as not a real photograph of her, so there's probably no legal way to act against the magazine; the text also makes clear that they are doing this to punish her for her political opinions.

It is not only women who are treated this way (although as Hot Air points out, Playboy did much the same thing in 2009).  We remember the case of 'Rick Santorum's Google problem,' in which a gay rights activist (and bully) decided to disgust the Santorums by linking their name to a filthy substance associated with homosexual acts.  This was also a use of disgust to punish political opinions.

The old saying that 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me' isn't entirely false, but it isn't entirely true either.  Many people of good will are also of sensitive natures, who see the disgusting things being done and would never want it to be done to them.  So, they will stay quiet and keep their heads down -- which is just what the bullies want.  S. E. Cupp is surely brave enough to face it down, as Rick Santorum was, but the example of what was done to them will quiet others.  Those others have every right to be in the public space as well.

Dr. Nussbaum intended for her idea to have a humane effect on the law and the public space.  I cannot agree that the effect will be anything of the sort.  If anything, we are already too far in that direction.  There ought to be a mechanism for replying to bullies of this sort.  We need a strong enough medicine that it convinces them to do what decency would compel, had not they been born without it.

Dawsonville Pool Room Update

FOX News came out to Dawsonville last week to report on the outrageous seizure of the Dawsonville Pool Room.  [UPDATE:  News video now below the fold to speed page loading times.--Grim]

There are several things that make this a travesty.

1)  That the crime has been fully prosecuted, so that the identity of the actual guilty party is known, and restitution ought to be his responsibility accordingly;

2)  That the owner of the Dawsonville Pool Room is fully compliant in helping the law enforcement agencies;

3)  That he has even been trying to "pay" the "debt," although the fact is that Georgia had licensed the accountant that defrauded the owner (and robbed Georgia of its tax revenues), which means that Georgia bears at least as much responsibility for the "debt" as he does;

4)  And thus that therefore Georgia is punishing a man who is, properly speaking, a crime victim.  The state ought to protect its citizens when they are victimized by criminals, not exploit them;

and furthermore,

5)  That destroying a functional business in the middle of a recession, shuttering its doors under arms and seizing every dime of cash with gun in hand, was a thing better fit for bandits than anyone who would claim to be a man of the law.

Where are the waitresses going to find work now?  How is the government going to get its money by killing the goose that lays the golden egg?

UPDATE:  This post has been substantially revised from its first version, because I was angry when I wrote the first version.  I think substantial anger is justified by this case, but I wish to ensure that I don't lash out at those -- like FOX News -- who are merely bringing attention to the injustice.

Medieval Spain

This is a remarkable and pleasant documentary, which I encountered while doing some research on the Spanish crusades.  I suppose it should be said that it ends on a bad note, but aside from the last five minutes or so, it's a truly enjoyable film.  [UPDATE:  The movie has been moved below the fold.--Grim]

Part of it quotes the Rule of St. Benedict, which requires monks to sleep with robes and cord-belts about them, so that they are "always ready" to rise and do God's work.  Sir Robert Baden-Powell invented a fictional "Knight's Code" for the Boy Scouts, which encoded the principle of semper paratus:

Be always ready with your armor on, except when you are taking your rest at night.
Defend the poor, and help them that cannot defend themselves.
Do nothing to hurt or offend anyone alse.
Be prepared to fight in the defense of your country.
At whatever you are working, try to win honor and a name for honesty.
Never break your promise.
Maintain the honor of your country with your life.
Rather die honest than live shamelessly.
Chivalry requires that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace; and to do good unto others.

It turns out that the principle is as well rooted in the monastic tradition as in the knightly one.

Recessional

Niall Ferguson wonders after the majesty of a jubilee:

A hundred years ago, the seemingly immortal Emperor Franz Josef was approaching his 82nd birthday. This year Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, meaning that she has reigned since 1952. A sprightly 86, she has acquired precisely the same air of immortality as the old Habsburg Emperor (to whom she is no doubt distantly related). 

Last week I watched an astonishing number of bandsmen in bearskin hats and bright red tunics rehearsing for the jubilee celebrations, which culminate next month. Stuck in the resulting traffic, I had time to ponder why, at a time of deep cuts in defense spending, Britain can still afford the world’s finest military bands. 

“Austerity” has become the watchword of David Cameron’s premiership as he grapples with the huge deficits run up by his Labour predecessors. Yet there is nothing austere about the Diamond Jubilee. On June 3, according to the official website, “Up to a thousand boats will muster on the river as the Queen prepares to lead one of the largest flotillas ever seen on the River Thames.”

Don't hold it against him that he doesn't cite Kipling.  It's a proof of the thing he is worried about that he doesn't know to cite it.

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 

The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen. 

Talking Blues, Scottish Style, in Australia

The important line is this poem:  "Whar Stands Scotland Now?  Stands it Whar it Used To?  Whar Stands Scotland Now?  Stands it Whar it Could Do?"

As to which, I honestly don't know how Scotland came to this.  If there was ever a people who seemed to have a hearty national sense for vengeance -- Nemo Me Impune Lacessit!  -- surely it was the Scots.  If that can be lost, all can be lost.

"The First 9/11"

This is really impressive stuff, WaPo.

On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”  Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”

Wow, those evil Mormons.  I guess they were the first terrorists, huh?  Well, it turns out -- deep in the article, buried on the second page -- that there's a little backstory that didn't make the first dozen paragraphs.

The massacre was an anomaly for the church, because it was Mormons who were more likely to be targeted in the early days of their religion, which was founded in the 1830s and 1840s.

UPDATE:

Hot Air notices the story.  One of their comments asks:  

"What about the Dorn/Ayers militia from 30 yrs ago?"

That's just crazy talk.

A Precedent for that California Problem

Apparently this massive-debt-default situation has come around before... oddly enough, also in Greece.  Medievalists.net has the article (h/t Medieval News).  An heir to the disputed throne of Byzantium asked the army assembled for the Fourth Crusade to assist him in claiming that throne.  In return, he promised a lavish payment as well as substantial military support during the Crusade.

Soon after becoming Alexos IV, however, it proved that the newly-made emperor could not pay up.  So...

The crusaders’ only concern was to extract every penny of the money due to them. When, after mid-November 1203, Alexios IV began to cool in his attitude towards the crusaders and made only token payments to them, the crusading leaders, according to Villehardouin, ‘often sent to him [Alexios IV] and asked him for the payment of the moneys due, as he had covenanted’. Similarly, Robert of Clari records that the crusading leaders twice ‘asked the emperor for their payment’. In early December, after the flow of funds had ceased altogether, the barons finally decided to send envoys to Alexios to ask him to honour their contract, otherwise the crusaders ‘would seek their due by any means they could’. One of the emissaries sent to the imperial palace was Villehardouin. According to his first-hand account, upon admission to the audience chamber, the crusader envoys demanded that the emperor fulfil his commitments to the crusaders. If he failed to do so, the crusaders would ‘strive to obtain their due by all the means they could’. The rank- and-file crusaders were not ignorant of this ultimatum. Robert of Clari records that ‘all the counts and leaders of the army gathered and went to the emperor’s palace and demanded their money at once … [I]f he did not pay them, they would seize so much of his property that they would be paid’.

He did not pay, and a little capitalist "creative destruction" followed.

Unfortunately, though the debt was recouped, the destruction of Constantinople severely weakened what had been a fortification against Islamic expansion from the East.  The Greeks continued to hold sway for another two hundred and fifty years, but never so strongly as they had before.  Eventually, the rising Turkish power swept them away.

The fiscal catastrophe that dwarfs Greece

What happens when you share a currency with a political unit in a fiscal shambles?  No, I don't mean Greece:

So JPMorgan makes a $2 billion mistake -- less than 7 percent of their 2011 earnings -- with their own money, and senators are calling for hearings. The California's governor's office raised its 2012 budget deficit projections -- namely their overspending of public money -- almost 50 percent, from $9.2 billion to $16 billion, an error of almost eight percent of the state's total budget, in four months, yet those same members of Congress remain as silent as a Trappist monk.

H/t Maggie's Farm

The Dictionary of Old English

Acquired Savants

It's an interesting fact that severe brain injuries rarely, but sometimes, reveal remarkable talents in people that they never had before.  The Atlantic has an interesting article thinking about the problems that fact raises.

Let me just note, though, that these problems disappear if you adopt the view of consciousness that I have sometimes advocated here.  If consciousness is received by the brain rather than produced by it, an adjustment to the brain will receive a different part of the signal.  Think of an old television set, when we used to broadcast TV through the air.  The whole of television was in the signal, invisible, impossible to notice without a system that was structured in just the right way.

With such a system, though, you would find yourself watching a baseball game.  But that wasn't the whole of the signal:  retune the receiver, and you'd be watching a Western or a soap opera.  All of it was there:  it was how you tuned the receiver that determined what you got.

By the same token, if you gave the TV a good whack, sometimes you'd find that the signal became rather fuzzy.  But sometimes it would improve!  Sometimes it was just that whack that would bring the picture into extraordinary focus.

Of course, whack it hard enough and you might end up trying to show two programs at once; or, in fact, you might break the mechanism that was capable of receiving the signal.  In that case you'd end up with a piece of junk that was once a television, a physical object now insensitive to the invisible signal in the air.

If that's the way consciousness works -- that is, if there is a unitary consciousness that our individual minds express individually because we are uniquely tuned to it -- then this phenomenon is no surprise at all.  Make a significant adjustment to the manner in which the brain is tuned, and you will receive a different part of the signal.

A proper wedding

I may have posted this before; if so, I apologize.  It occurred to me again because my neighbor's son is marrying a Jewish woman and will have a (moderately) Jewish ceremony.  I'm going to crochet a chuppah covering for them because, as we all know, no chuppah, no shtuppah.  The father of the groom, a fine carpenter, will build the chuppah structure.

This is the ideal wedding dance.  It always gives me goosebumps.



Speaking of rituals, I finally realized that what I needed to do was have a proper Episcopalian church funeral for my aunt right here in my hometown, just for me and my friends and neighbors.  That way I can attend the family thing that's going to happen in San Antonio next month without any tension.  I've engaged a bagpiper, chosen the Old and New Testament readings and hymns, and set everything up for next Friday.  A friend is going to be kind enough to drive down from Houston.

I'll Have Another Does It Again

Another squeaker.  I'm enjoying these:

Come On, Guys

If this is the plan, it's time to rethink the plan.

If the law is upheld, Republicans will take to the floor to tear out its most controversial pieces, such as the individual mandate and requirements that employers provide insurance or face fines

If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.

Apparently it's not politically risky to require insurance companies to go out of business, though, which is what this plan will in fact require.  What you're going to get out of this plan is insurance companies that must provide coverage to anyone who asks, even if they wait until they get sick to ask; but without the funding that the individual mandate (however unconstitutionally) ensured.

Employers will drop their plans, and insurance companies will go out of business.  Now what?

Courage is the most important political virtue, as Machiavelli reminds us.  If you're going to fight for principled constitutionalism, have the courage to make an argument.  It's not too hard to explain that the government ought not to demand that businesses are run in ways that make them go bankrupt.  It's not too hard to explain that people are better off being able to obtain insurance than not.

If you haven't the guts to make that argument to the People, it's time to start drawing up single payer plans.  That's where this plan gets us.  If you want them at the state level, get going on it now.  Otherwise, we'll have to amend the Constitution to permit it at the Federal level -- or just do what our left-leaning brothers and sisters do, and learn to ignore the Constitutional limits entirely.

Answering One of the Old Questions

The general disruption of philosophy in the contemporary era is demonstrated by questions like this.  But that's OK; questions are a good thing to have.

We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad? 

In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. (If you don't believe me, read the first nine chapters of my book.) But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I'm dead, I don't exist. If I don't exist, how can being dead be bad for me? 

People sometimes respond that death isn't bad for the person who is dead. Death is bad for the survivors. But I don't think that can be central to what's bad about death. Compare two stories.
Story 1. Your friend is about to go on the spaceship that is leaving for 100 Earth years to explore a distant solar system. By the time the spaceship comes back, you will be long dead. Worse still, 20 minutes after the ship takes off, all radio contact between the Earth and the ship will be lost until its return. You're losing all contact with your closest friend. 

Story 2. The spaceship takes off, and then 25 minutes into the flight, it explodes and everybody on board is killed instantly. 

Story 2 is worse. But why? It can't be the separation, because we had that in Story 1. What's worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died. But how can it be true that death is bad for the person who dies?

This is one of those questions that we once understood to have a clear answer.  We've discussed a mild version of Avicenna's proof for a Necessary Existent:

1)  Everything we know that comes to exist gets its existence from something else.
2)  An actual infinite series cannot exist,
∴
3) At least one thing exists of its own nature, rather than getting existence from something else.

Exactly what that thing is has been subject to much debate -- Allah, for Avicenna; God for Aquinas; perhaps some meta-laws that give parameters to the expression of quantum fields for contemporary physics (but where and how do these laws exist?).  The point is that the first existent exists by nature; everything that follows from it exists contingently.

Thus to exist is to be like the first thing -- like God, like Allah, like the ultimate source of reality and therefore of all goods.  Indeed, for Avicenna and Aquinas, existence and 'the good' were the same thing.  To die, insofar as that means 'to cease to exist,' is to lose a likeness and a connection to that thing.  To die is only a good if you die to actualize some perfect and lasting virtue, some beauty or some good so strong that it even more perfectly ties you to that everlasting source of good.  So says the Havamal:  'Cattle die, kinsmen die, and you also will die:  but the one thing I know never dies is the fame of the heroic dead.'

Once that was the easy knowledge of pagan and heathen, Christian and Muslim alike.  Now a professor of philosophy from Yale seems not to be aware that the argument ever existed at all.

"I'm sorry, your race card is no longer accepted at this establishment"

James O'Keefe is at it again, this time with video showing that voters are on the registration rolls even though they've been excused from jury duty as non-citizens.  That was a clever trick, cross-checking the voting rolls against the jury records.  There's something unusually offensive about using one's lack of citizenship as an excuse to avoid jury duty, then trying to vote anyway.

I swiped the title from one of the article's commenters.  My astonishment that voter I.D. has become a race issue knows no bounds, as does my astonishment at people who think that there's no voter fraud.

The Texas primary is right around the corner.  Early voting, in fact, already has begun.  As I'll be traveling to a wedding on election day, I'm going to early-vote any day now, as soon as I figure out what to do about some of the less-publicized races.  Any comments from people knowledgeable about races such as the Texas Supreme Court justices or the Railroad Commission (our oil & gas body) are encouraged to hold forth in the comments section.  This will be the first election in ages in which we've have some realistic choices for a U.S. Representative other than Ron Paul, not only because he's not running again but because the district lines have been redrawn.  Our new (to us) incumbent, Blake Farenthold, is a bit of a Tea Party type but not a Pauline.

Road Hammers

Since we were just talking about long-haul truckers, I was delighted to find a new band devoted to them.



They know something about their roots -- nobody ought to sing about truckers who doesn't know Georgia's own Jerry Reed.



But maybe some of you don't know Jerry Reed.



Everybody's ridden that Monteagle grade, right?  It's something to see, coming down toward Chattanooga.

Drawing Lines

This is a challenging expression:

When I was young, a pastor said, whenever you draw a line between us and them, bear in mind that Jesus is on the other side of that line.

There may be something useful there; but I must say I doubt that it's true.  Jesus himself was quite fond of drawing lines:  he came, as he said, to send not peace but a sundering sword.

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Are we to take it that there is no right side of that line?

Low Bridge

Via the Borderline Boys, a little film:



My grandfather was a welder who ran a service station for long-haul truckers.  One of them made a similar mistake.  In those days long-distance communication was often by telegraph, which charged by the word and therefore rewarded brevity.  He sent his letter of resignation in the form of a quatrain:

Saw low bridge,
Couldn't stop.
Now you have
An open-top.

"I do not think you can have the duck."

Do grocery stores in your area carry fresh or frozen ducks in the meat department?  None of them in my little town does any more.  I'm even striking out in the grocery stores in other towns nearby.  My store offered to special-order them for us, but when we came back to check they said only that the shipper claimed they were seasonal.  "It's seasonal" is becoming an all-purpose explanation for whatever the local stores don't feel like stocking.  Wal-Mart wouldn't reliably carry Mason jars for canning, for instance.  Seasonal in South Texas!  What a laugh.

I finally found a mail-order place that will ship the same brand of whole ducks frozen, at a price that rivals what the store used to charge even counting the freight.  Unfortunately, we still don't have our ducks.  What arrived, by mistake, was a couple of large packages of frozen duck sausage.  I'm starting to feel like Steve Martin (sorry, they won't let me embed!):  "He can have the chicken."

Reacting Emotionally to the Non-Plasticity of Mankind

Grim writes an interesting post with quotes from Marx and Heinlein. I want to add something about that, related also to my last post. If there is indeed such a thing as "general intelligence" or cognitive ability (and there is), and it is largely inherited (as it is), so that every man's possible mental accomplishments are limited on the day of his birth - well, how does it make you feel?

I used to hold "blank slate" ideas - and I can tell you that when they're applied to politics, be they leftist or no, they are extremely agitating. Marx (and, I believe, Charles Fourier before him) believed strongly in a huge well of untapped potential in the human race. Get the social arrangements right, and what we call "genius" will become "average." One Marxist thinker, who didn't emerge on a quick google, claimed that the average New Communist Man would have the mental abilities of a Darwin, a Freud, or a Marx - though he admitted there would be deviations from the average, with unimaginable geniuses waiting to emerge and transform the world. The frustrating sense that this incredible world is potentially avaialable right now, with the humans we have, and it's only being held back by social arrangements...well, how to describe it? It can't be good for the blood pressure.

Closely akin to this is the idea that John Derbyshire calls "educational romanticism" - the idea that, since anyone can do almost anything, all that's standing between your children (or your community) and Nobel Prizes in physics, seven-figure salaries, etc. is insufficient education plus discrimination -- surely that idea would fill anyone with bile. I grew up believing "blank slate" ideas and tasted some of that bile, and still get the aftertaste when I reflect on what the Greens have done to our industrial capacity...but that is a different tale.

I do not find it depressing or dismal to see this isn't so with intelligence, that blank slate ideas are nonsense, that in fact the U.S. probably does as well as any country ever in getting its best brains into higher education (this book and that book document it well) -- and that the creation of genius by an act of will must wait, not for a messianic statist, but for technology we may get within the next century. It's a comfort to know we haven't been wasting as much genius as I used to think.

What do you think and how do you feel about it?

On that Foreign Policy article

A few posts below, Grim discusses a foolish Foreign Policy article that attempts to discredit ideas linking IQ to wealth - the title, so predicably, throws the thunderbolt of "racism." (Paragraph 1 of the link shows why I chose "thunderbolt.")

The author firmly establishes his ignorance in the first paragraph - declaring that "Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Steven Jay Gould, among others." He cites then to Gould's mendacious Mismeasure of Man.

Gould was an accomplished paleontologist, and knew a lot of important things about fossils and evolution. He was, however, an unrepentant Marxist, which required him to be a psychological blank-slater - and this seriously biased his work when he strayed out of his field. His specific ideas on race, that there hasn't been time for evolution to create signficant differences between large human families, that human evolution stopped 40,000-50,000 year ago, and that genetically our differences really are "skin deep" only, these have not stood the test of time or psychometrics.

The most famous example is well described in this magnificent book -- a sizable increase in cognitive ability among the Ashkenazi Jews. (Average IQ 112-15 - nearly a full standard devition, with huge overrepresentation among the top levels of IQ, and top achievements in science.) The distinction of "Ashkenazi" is important -- this intellectual prominence does not occur among Jews whose ancestors did not sojourn in Europe, and these Jews are a genetically distinct group (having also a specific set of heightened genetic risks, notably to Tay-Sachs disease). Yet their split from the rest of the Jewish population occurred in historic times, showing that significant - historically, incredibly significant - human evolution happens on a much smaller timescale than Gould imagined, or the Foreign Policy author will admit.

(The author mentions the Flynn Effect. He neglects to mention that it appears to have stopped, at least in some places -- suggesting that mankind is not so plastic as he wishes.)

I haven't read IQ and the Wealth of Nations - but according to the review quoted here (review by the man I believe to be the best science blogger alive - and one well versed in biology and psychometrics), the book draws on 620 different IQ studies from around the world and 813,778 tested individuals. In covering blacks, both in Africa and in "diaspora" countries like Jamaica, he drew on 155 different studies with 387,286 people tested -- leading me to doubt strongly the article's suggestion that the sample sizes are too small to say anything meaningful about black or African IQ. [Edit: The link in this paragraph is actually to a review of Lynn's later book, Race Differences in Intelligence; 137 of the studies in the later book were not included in the earlier, though both had extensive data.]

None of this has anything to do with John Derbyshire's Takimag Column that the author opens with - Mr. Derbyshire's column is primarily about antisocial and criminal behavior among American blacks rather than IQ among African blacks. (There is, as we discussed long ago, a very strong correlation between low IQ and criminal and antisocial behavior - one that cuts across races, making it hard to pigeonhole as "the legacy of slavery and oppression" - and you can read a lot about it in chapter 11 of this book.)

If you want to know something about the current state of knowledge about race, race differences, and IQ, you've picked a a good time -- there is an excellent new popular book out: Race and Equality: The Nature of the Debate by John Harvey, published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research. It's about 140 pages in pdf form, and I found it readable in a couple of easy sittings (I bought the pdf straight from the site so I could read it right away; Amazon has a low supply of paperback versions I believe).

Assisted Euphemizing

My very elderly aunt, who has been bed-bound since she broke her hip last summer, has at long last been released from her suffering.  The family members who controlled her modest finances are following her wishes in having her cremated.  Oddly, the resulting freedom from time pressure makes it all the more difficult to settle on appropriate funeral rites.  It becomes almost like choosing a wedding date; I expect "hold the date" cards in the mail any day now.  Nor did it take long for the participants to stumble, as if for the first time, on the notion that the service should not be anything as dour as a funeral, but instead a celebration of her life.  I long for the old-fashioned approach:  a standard ceremony expressing loss, grief, and respect, conducted immediately for whoever can manage to fly in, with minimal pressure on the family to agree on what would be an appropriate celebration of a life they all viewed so differently.

As we are all Episcopalians, that seemed the least likely point of controversy:  just pick a church and hold a service out of the Book of Common Prayer.  I find now, though, that the plan is to hold a service in the chapel of the "assisted living" facility where my aunt spent ten unhappy years after being uprooted from her East Texas home.  The family sold her on assisted living on the reasonable grounds that she could not take care of herself in a town she no longer shared with any family.  It made sense to move to where most of her surviving family lived.  The fact remained, however, that she was being institutionalized.  That the institution had a benevolent purpose didn't change the fact that it was devoted to systematizing its residents' schedules:  telling them when to eat, when to sleep, and when to wake -- for their own good, of course, and in order to maintain some orderly structure in their lives.  My aunt simply hated it.  She appreciated having help, but quickly discerned the underlying message of the place, which was that residents who asked for too much help (a wheelchair, for instance) would be moved from their small but reasonably humane apartments into a nursing wing, where there were two beds to a room and no room for much of anything personal.  She put off that last evolution until she broke her hip and became bed-bound, but she had been so dreading it for years that she endured excruciating pain in walking rather than use a wheelchair.  The residents all feared the nursing wing.  It didn't matter what the staff called it -- I think "extended living" is the currently accepted euphemism -- they knew it was the place where even more of their lives would be stripped away, while they endured remonstrations for their poor attitude.

My mother, stepmother, sister, and father all died at home.  They were lucky enough to die of fairly acute illnesses at a time when they either had partners still living or, in my father's case, as the survivor, could afford some live-in help toward the end.  He initially resisted bringing in live-in help, as I would later learn would be the case for every elderly relative in whose affairs I tried to intervene.  My aunt might have been able to stay at home in East Texas if she had been willing to consider it.  My mother-in-law resists the idea today.  I'm used to the reaction by now:  a visceral dislike of having strangers come into the home.  It's not a reaction I would have guessed.  I suppose I always thought of it as something like the luxury of having a butler or a ladies' maid.  It worked out wonderfully for my father.  It beats by miles having to answer to an institutional staff who work, in effect, for a landlord you can't get rid of.  If I survive my husband I'll certainly budget ahead of time for as much live-in help as I can afford.

My cousin seems pleased with the idea of using the assisting-living facility chapel for my aunt's memorial service, and has scheduled it for a little over a month from now, when a lot of the family will happen to be in town for other reasons.  It was kind of the facility to offer the chapel, of course, and I suspect the assisted-living facility has as pleasant associations for my cousin as it had dreadful ones for my aunt (and now has for me).  It was a nice place, as such places go, but it was a dehumanizing institution nevertheless.  There was a ten-year battle between my cousin and my aunt over whether my aunt would fall in line with the conventional wisdom that it was a fine place and she was lucky to be there.  My aunt was prepared to go so far as to admit it was necessary, a place to be endured with as much grace as possible, but she strongly resisted pretending anything beyond that -- a stubbornness that led to ten years of strained relations and accusations of ingratitude.  The decision to have a memorial service there strikes my suspicious heart as the final salvo in that ten-year battle:  "See!  It really is nice here!"  So I have a little over a month to prepare to be gracious in a venue that makes me want to climb the walls.  I'm practicing all the Miss Manners lines, like "You're very kind to say so" and "Will you please excuse me?"

Ex-Post Facto Evidence

A blog called "Colorlines" has a story with a  headline that is not supported by the story itself:  "Even Gun Enthusiasts are Disgusted with Trayvon Martin Gun Range Targets."

Nothing in the story that follows suggests that; actually, it sounds like the targets are big sellers.

Still, let me go ahead and provide him with the evidence that he is lacking.  I'm not sure if I really qualify as a "gun enthusiast," since I prefer blades to guns; but I do own, and sometimes enjoy shooting, several guns.  I think that the target is a pretty low thing to do.  The Martin family is going to have to see that.  Whatever your thoughts about the case -- and the facts remain somewhat murky -- simple human decency ought to outweigh any thought of money to be made.

Nevertheless he says he was motivated by the hope of money; and apparently he was rewarded.  When something is rewarded you get more of it.  Expect more of this, with all attendant consequences.

The Whole Man

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." 

-Karl Marx,* The German Ideology 

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” 

-Robert Heinlen, Time Enough for Love

It's always interesting when you see an ideal held by both sides of a deep ideological split.  This sentiment points to the praiseworthiness of developing all aspects of our nature, burnishing virtues of mind and body and spirit.

This was Plato's idea as well:  the virtues should prove to be a kind of unity.  Courage, for example, means doing the right thing under threat:  so you must also have the virtue of practical wisdom, to know what 'the right thing' happens to be.  Knowing is likewise of little good without the capacity to do, and so you ought to have trained your body to maximize its capacities for action.  This, in turn, opens new ranges for the expression of courage:  developing a capacity to swim strongly and well means that it may be courageous for you to save a drowning man, whereas it would not be courageous but foolish for someone who swims poorly to try.

So far this morning I have replaced the belt on a lawn tractor, arranged a plumber to fix the leak in the basement pipes, read and considered some philosophy, and killed a huge and bothersome nest of fire ants.**  Most of those tasks are unpleasant, but the sheer variety of them makes it rewarding.  It's pleasant to exercise so many different faculties, even if each individual exercise -- philosophy aside -- is no special joy.

* A Marxist friend of mine tells me that this quote is really one of Engels' contributions to the work, and that Marx hated it.  I assume he's right about that, although I haven't seen the documentation.  It makes sense, as Marx was economist enough to fully grasp the benefits of specialization -- and the necessity, at his point in the Industrial Age, of maintaining that efficiency in order to support his new kind of society.  It may not always be necessary, though:  tasks that benefit from specialization are very often the kind of tasks that can be automated.  That frees the man to be a man again, not a widget or an insect.  Indeed, if he is not to starve, it requires him to show the flexibility that is the mark of a man and not an insect.

** Unless environmental legislation should someday retroactively protect the fire ant species, in which case I have no idea how that rock got turned over, the mound dug up, and poison poured all over the furious beasts.  It's a complete mystery.

Hooah, Kid.

Now, you may be asking why an unassisted triple play is a big deal.  Take a look at the conditions, and give the boy some credit.  That's one of the rarest plays you'll ever see.

Baseball isn't my favorite game -- it's a Yankee sport (poking Raven), one that historian Kenneth S. Greenberg proved was not entirely satisfactory to Southern tastes.  (It turns out that Southerners wanted to keep the bat, just in case anyone wanted to try to tag them; and they refused as a point of honor to run away from any man, ball or no ball.)  Still, I have to admit, it's always a pleasure to sit down with a beer and watch on a summer afternoon.  Good to see the youngest generation taking to it.

The Vanishing Women

The title of the article is "Insight: Afghan women fade from White House focus as exit nears."

Now that is an insight:  and don't they just?

Shortly after sending U.S. troops to Afghanistan in October 2001, President George W. Bush focused so intently on freeing Afghan women from the shackles of Taliban rule that empowering them became central to the United States' mission there.  More than a decade later, as his successor Barack Obama charts a way out of the unpopular war.... Obama's lack of overt attention to Afghan women has led many to fear their hard-fought gains will slip away[.]

Indeed they will if no one defends them.  The best candidates for defending them are, of course, the Afghan women themselves.  In the future, if we take it upon ourselves to ensure that a traditionally-oppressed group has a new dawn of rights and respect, we need to ensure that they have not merely the recognized right but the practical means of self-defense.

"Touch not the cat bot a glove."  On that road, and no other, lies freedom.

So My Question Is...

...what kind of low-rent opposition researchers do Republicans employ?  Mitt Romney ran a hotly contested campaign against John McCain in 2008; the oppo book got published online, and there weren't any surprises in it.  Mitt Romney went on to run a hotly contested campaign against several well-connected Republicans this year, and nobody came up with anything beyond voting records and conflicting political position statements.

Yet since Romney became the presumptive nominee, we've suddenly learned that:

A)  He was arrested for disorderly conduct for refusing to obey police instructions on how to operate his boat;

B)  He was a roughhouse prankster who was part of a high-school gang that once jumped a guy and gave him a hair-cut.

Fortunately for Romney, there's a way to turn this around.

Romney Campaign Adopts New Slogan