Privileges

Here's the process for withholding privileged documents if you're a reasonably principled lawyer.  You put together the entire universe of documents that appear to be responsive to the document request.  Then you examine every single document to determine whether it falls within an established privilege, usually "work product" or "attorney-client."  The first cut of "work product" documents would include anything that could possibly be said to quote or reflect advice that the client received from counsel.  For the "attorney-client" category, the first cut would include anything from the attorney to the client or vice versa, including anything cc'ed to the law firm.

If only you got to stop there, document production would be a breeze.  The next step is harder.  In the case of work product, for instance, often the main document is OK, but a line or two might say, "As you know, counsel advised us that ______," and the blank would need to be redacted.  In the case of attorney-client privilege, you're not going to get away with withholding everything that was circulated past the lawyers.  If the cc list included anyone who wasn't a client, for instance, it goes back in the pile to be produced, because the privilege requires a showing that the advice was given and held in confidence.  Even if the cc list is made up exclusively of lawyers and clients, it still has to involve the quest for or rendition of legal advice.  You can't shield ordinary business documents from production by slapping a "lawyer cc" on them, though that gambit is often tried.

Even when you finish this more rigorous secondary process, you don't simply get to keep the documents you think are privileged and tell the other side to pound sand.  You have to produce a privilege log, a little chart that identifies each document, including its date, its recipients, and enough about its general nature to explain why you claim a privilege attaches to it.  This is a critical stage, because the judge and any competent lawyers in the case can take one look at your privilege log and see whether you're serious.  The absence of a privilege log, or the absence of detail, is a big red flag that screams "My idea of screening for privileged documents to sort everything into two piles:  the documents that will embarrass me and the documents that won't."  It's a more common approach than you might think.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is making a very reasonable demand today for a privilege log of the "Fast and Furious" documents withheld by the White House on the ground of executive privilege.  He's also on solid ground with the following observations:

“Just last week, when the attorney general was in front of this committee, I asked him twice if the president could claim executive privilege to protect a certain internal Justice Department email that has been withheld,” Grassley said.  “Given the explicit opportunity, the attorney general did not indicate he would be asking the president to assert executive privilege over such documents.” 

“The attorney general repeatedly claimed that the Justice Department was making an ‘extraordinary offer’ Tuesday night,” Grassley continued.  “The only thing extraordinary is that the attorney general offered a promise to produce documents one day and then asked the president to claim executive privilege over them the next.” 

Grassley also attacked Obama for waiting until the eleventh hour to assert the privilege.  “If this were a serious claim, it should have been raised much earlier,” Grassley said.

It's very difficult to understand how an executive privilege could attach to documents about a program the President claims not to have had any knowledge of.   Nor is it easy to understand how the Attorney General can assert with a straight face that the program in question dates from the Bush administration, and that he terminated it many months before he now asserts he even became aware of it.   In a trial, this kind of thing would prompt the filing of what we used to call a "motion to get real."

Discovery disputes are boring.  Judges hate to get involved in them, so they tend to blow them off by taking a "plague on both your houses" approach, which gives crummy lawyers an incentive to abuse privileges and hide evidence.  The media is doing the same thing right now, painting the picture of yet another partisan attack based on an arcane legal theory, which voters should tune out in frustration.  I hope they don't.

Knives as "Arms"

Volokh has an interesting examination of case law regarding whether knives are "arms" for Second Amendment purposes.

A lot seems to turn on whether a class of weapon is regularly used in "civilized warfare."  That standard would seem to make it proper to carry a Kabar, since it was military issue and is still regularly carried by soldiers, sailors and Marines...

...but not a Buck knife, which is primarily for hunting.  Yet the design is substantially the same, except the Buck 119 Special is a little shorter.

It's nice to know that swords still turn up as 'weapons of civilized war.' They're not as random or clumsy as a handgun, either.

On the Need for "Home Economics" Courses in School

Via Yahoo questions:

My girlfriend cooked raw chicken in the George foreman last night. The next day i wanted to grill my sandwich but she did not clean the foreman grill. I said i would get sick if i placed the sandwich on the grill where raw chicken has been. she insisted that the raw chicken cooked so i would not get sick from raw chicken juices. Whats going on here?

R. Lee Ermey, Bus Monitor

You know how we got here?  It's because we decided we were too soft for this.  These kids obviously have not had a proper sense of shame instilled into them by someone who knows how.

Children are barbarians.  Either you are strong enough to win their hearts, or they will eat yours.

Solstice

We have two great holidays every year:  Christmas, and the Summer Solstice.  This holiday happens to encompass Father's Day, our wedding anniversary, and an important family birthday.  As a consequence, it is a day of particular importance, celebrated by feasting and fellowship.

I hope yours has been as good.  Now comes the hard part of the year:  summer, the hungry time of old.  Still in the South, it is a time of year I look forward to only with dread.  We'll get through it, but we look toward the autumn with longing most of the time.

Fusion

I can't read this woman's site, which is in Russian, but her work speaks for itself.  She is a Muscovite who has incorporated Irish Clones lace motifs into her own signature style, in full color.  Clicking through to her site will give you some closeups.

Cheer up

From Frank J. Fleming:

Everyone is so gloomy about the future these days. Polls show that most people think we’re on the wrong path, and everyone walks around looking like the president just ate their dogs. . . . [W]hat’s the worst that could happen to us if we never get a handle on our finances — if we just keep spending and spending while the economy crumbles further? I guess in the absolute worst-case scenario, we’d have a complete economic meltdown, our money would become worthless, our government would collapse, and our infrastructure would fall apart.  Basically, all of civilization would be destroyed. . . .  So even if things are as bad as we can possibly imagine, we have this nice fallback option of becoming hunter-gatherers again.  People might even enjoy their new, simpler living conditions.  People do like camping.  And the movie The Hunger Games was pretty popular.  Plus, this would pretty much end childhood obesity.  And one day, soon after we start living this way, we’ll all say, “Wow, we sure were spoiled with all that running water, electricity, and no need to fear wild animals. Weren’t we silly about that?”  And we’ll have a good laugh.  Well, not all of us — just those who make it past the first winter.  So a few of us.  A few of us will have a good laugh.

'The Law' is the Name of that Ass You Rode Over the Border

Senator Rubio, on illegal immigration:

It’s a law-and-order issue. But it’s also an issue about human dignity and common decency. And when we lose sight of either aspect of the issue, we harm ourselves as well as the people who wish to live here. Many people who come here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn’t feed our families. If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here. 

Well, what about you?  Would you let your children die rather than violate the laws of a country to which you owe no citizen's loyalty?  Or would you get on the ass and ride?

The Most Peaceful Place on Earth

Iceland!  Just what you'd expect from a country that was exclusively settled by Vikings!

I guess it wouldn't be here.  Funny; it was just last Christmas we were noticing with worry that Ciudad Juarez, just over the border, had seen more people killed than Afghanistan.

This year, it's Chicago.

Take the Road

Now I Understand

Stories like this one have been coming hot and heavy since the Columbia trip, undermining the idea that the Secret Service are buttoned-down professionals. It's hard to understand how an organization with such an institutional history could become so unglued.

Until, that is, you find out what else their job entails. Now it all seems clear.

Another Example

Via Reason magazine, which has done yeoman work on this issue:

As the officers made their way to the back of the house, where the Avina’s 11-year-old and 14-year-old daughters were sleeping, Rosalie Avina screamed, “Don’t hurt my babies. Don’t hurt my babies.”

The agents entered the 14-year-old girl’s room first, shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl, who was lying on her bed, rolled onto the floor, where the agents handcuffed her. Next they went to the 11-year-old’s room. The girl was sleeping. Agents woke her up by shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl’s eyes shot open, but she was, according to her own testimony, “frozen in fear.” So the agents dragged her onto the floor. While one agent handcuffed her, another held a gun to her head....

After two hours, the agents realized they had the wrong house—the product of a sloppy license plate transcription—and left. 

As the article notes, the Justice Department has decided to go to court in favor of the notion that Federal agents have a right to hold a gun to the head of 11-year-old children.  I'm pretty sure that no such right can possibly exist, though they plainly have the power at present.

Anyway, the Ninth Circuit found that this conduct was "unreasonable."  So when does someone at DEA go to jail for unreasonably deploying lethal force against an 11-year-old during a wrongful raid?  Never, that's when.

What 'People' Are We Talking About?

Bob Krumm on Obama's refusal to enforce DOMA drug laws school standards gambling laws immigration laws:

Since the very beginning of our Nation’s founding, there has been (by design) a healthy tension between the Legislative branch, which writes laws, and the Executive Branch, which executes those laws.  Laws were only de facto valid when they were both on the books and willingly enforced.  As every law is a limit upon the people, this created a very high barrier to restrictions on individual rights. 

"Every law is a limit on the people," eh?  So what the anarchists really need is just to elect a President, who can refuse to enforce any of the laws?

But which "people" are we talking about here?  The law in this case is a restriction on peoples who are not American citizens:  it restricts them from moving to America without a permit.  The restriction doesn't particularly affect the American people.

The preamble to the Constitution suggests that it is the people of the United States who ordain and establish the government, for ends of their own.  They are good ends, but they are not universal ends:  and the category of people who established and ordained the United States is not universal either.

Maybe Krumm is right in general:  maybe it's generally a good thing if the law goes unenforced.  Maybe it's fine to have a lot of laws on the books that have no force in practice.

Somehow, though, I doubt it.  That sounds to me like a vision of the law as the sword of Damocles:  a deadly thing hanging over my head, fit to fall at any time.  But -- for now -- a little string keeps it from my skull.

A Pretty Good Run

Tallulah Gorge

The Tallulah River, from atop the Gorge

Beef, Bread, and Beer

Father's Day

From Sippican:

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys." 

- Harmon Killebrew

Against Our Cultural Bias Towards the Adults

A recent study on parents who have had same-sex relationships purports to show that their children have measurably worse outcomes than the children of married, stable biological parents.  The study has come in for a lot of wrath, as well as some legitimate criticisms of its methodology and conclusions.

One of the critics is E. J. Graff, a writer who is an advocate of same-sex marriage.  I've generally been impressed with her writing even though she and I are on opposite sides of this issue.  She is raising a point about the methodology and conclusions that I agree with -- that the study doesn't actually prove what the author claims it proves -- but in a way that makes my head spin.

Those aren’t the children of same-sex parents. Those are the children of different-sex parents, one of whom later has some sexual relationship with someone of the same sex, however brief or sustained. The gay dads he’s writing about? Those are men who finally get an adolscence, late in life, after they’ve lied to themselves or others to try to fit in socially because people like Mark Regnerus told them being gay is bad. In our world, those men should never have married women. A healthy society would let them come out young and, if they wanted children, have children with a male partner with whom they could happily remain. 

Emphasis in the original.

I have a serious problem with this way she has framed her point here.  All children are children of different-sex parents.  There is no such thing as a man having children with a male partner.  Whatever else a healthy society may do, a healthy society does not lie to itself about reality.

What happens when a male-male couple 'has children' is that the mother of the child is somehow excluded from the child's life.  She may be involved to some degree, or she may not, but the child doesn't have the day-to-day relationship with his or her mother that a child would have in a household with married biological parents.

It seems to me that the child has a very strong interest in having a loving relationship with both of its biological parents.  They are the two people in the world who are most like the child, after all:  so much of who we are is passed genetically that knowing your parents is an advantage in and of itself.  The better you understand them, and  how they deal with the difficulties they encounter in life, the better prepared you will be to engage in the difficulties life is most likely to throw you.  Even if you don't like your parents, you benefit from knowing them well.

Thus we can see a ranking, from the perspective of the child's interests:  the ideal thing for a child is to be born into a loving, stable heterosexual family in which the child can have a good relationship with both biological parents.  Every other option is less ideal, though we can disagree about whether a family with happy gay partners -- not "parents," though one of them might be -- is better or worse for the child than living in a marriage between unhappy biological parents.  That's the kind of thing that a study might usefully inform, if one is ever done; but it will be a while before it can be done well, since right now the data set is limited.  (I would think you would need to control for a lot of other things to get useful data, though:  income levels, for example, surely affect the outcomes for a family's children.)

Now having children isn't one of those things that you shouldn't do if you can't do it perfectly.  Perfection of the end is the proper way to aim, but it's still better to partially achieve the end than to entirely fail.  Many argue that it is better for children to spend time with their parents than in day care centers, for example, but even if that were conclusively proven it wouldn't mean that no family should have children if they can't avoid using day care.  That would be absurd:  clearly the child obtains a benefit from being born, and more benefits from every day of life.  To deny the child birth is to deny the child every good it will ever have.

That would be like telling a poor family that, since they can't eat steak, they shouldn't eat at all.  It's a ridiculous and absurd notion.  It's better for the child to be born, and have the chance for some happiness.  Besides, the odds aren't everything:  maybe the child will figure out a way to do better than the odds suggest.

For a long time, though, we've been talking about this issue as if the happiness of the parents was the paramount issue in how we think about questions of marriage and divorce.  Whatever else the study did, it at least put the focus back where it belongs.  Families are about kinship bonds across generations:  the children's interest is at least as important as the parents' interests, even if the child is powerless to defend its interests.  I would argue that the interests of the earlier set of parents is also relevant -- that there is a continuing set of mutual duties between all the involved generations -- but that seems to be an unpopular position these days.  If we can get people to at least change focus to favor the interests of the next generation over the current one, I'll take that as a good start.

A Swordsman on Swordfighting

I've had the chance to train with him.  For those of you who are interested, the man knows what he's talking about.

Gremlins

We're having a bit of technical, inter-tubes related difficulties here at the Hall.  Don't mind if you don't see me on any given day.

Mostly I'm just laying in wood for the winter anyway.  The odds of me having a great insight to trouble you with at this time are fairly small.  I can tell you that chainsaws, given modern fuel conditions, work better at 50:1 than 60:1; and that you need to change your gas out before it gets a month old, no matter how good your ratio happens to be.



Since we're doing old cartoons on relevant subjects, how about a Depression-era Disney cartoon on the subject of eviction?

The Nature of the Thing

We've spoken often of views marriage, and especially of Aquinas' concept that matrimony is based in natural law:  that is, it is based on human nature.  Our nature imposes upon us certain requirements -- if we wish to survive as a species, or as a culture, these requirements take the force of duties.

Of course, it's a duty that doesn't have to be done by everyone:  there are some who reject it for themselves, which is fine so long as they support it when it is done by others.  If it is a fact of human nature -- and surely it is -- we have to sort out a way to make this work.  It's a duty that falls on us all, either to bear ourselves, or to support.

But she is wrong to say that children are poor conversationalists.  That may be true for children whose parents didn't bother to talk to them like people.  If you did, though, you probably found that they were very interesting conversationalists.  A child who has been engaged enough to have learned to speak well and properly presents quite a challenge in conversation.  If you take them seriously, and engage them seriously, you'll have few conversations as interesting in your whole life.

Restoring Faith in Government

So we're all excited to learn that the Justice Department has appointed two investigators to look into the rampant leaks, sometimes derailing critical Top Secret programs, that have recently emerged in a series of articles highly favorable to the Obama administration.  However...

Well, look on the bright side.  Only one of them has heavily donated to both the Senate and Presidential campaigns of President Obama; while holding an office to which he was appointed by President Obama; in order to take a position for which he will doubtless be paid a fine honorarium by the Justice Department that serves President Obama.

The other guy is just in the pay of the administration.  Otherwise, he appears to be independent.  Since the Justice Department is theoretically autonomous to a certain degree -- if Eric Holder can be relied upon in this regard -- there should be nothing to worry about.

How not to chat on Facebook

From PJ Media:

Here’s a thought: If you’re a liberal who feels the urge to murder kittens when someone says something nice about Sarah Palin or a conservative who thinks Obama is a mixture of Stalin and Darth Vader and you just can’t shut up about it, maybe you shouldn’t be [Facebook] friends with someone who vehemently disagrees with you. If you are going to be someone’s friend, then you should keep in mind that friends politely disagree. They don’t regularly insult each other, trash other people in the thread, and go off on angry rants. So, just remember what your mother said, “If you can’t say something nice, then shut your ignorant mouth, you loser! I can’t believe I ever had a horrible child like you! You’ll never be a success! Never!” Ok, maybe I’m just assuming that’s how the mothers of people like that talk, but you have to admit that it would explain a lot.

Thoughts on Silence

Here is an interview with a Trappist monk on the virtue he finds in what is popularly called the vow of silence.

When a man and woman meet and fall in love they begin to talk. They talk and talk and talk all day long and can't wait to meet again to talk some more. They talk for hours together, and never tire of talking and so talk late into the night, until they become intimate—and then they don't talk anymore. Neither would describe intimacy as “the sacrifice of words” and a monk is not inclined to speak about his intimacy with God in this way.

A Study in Terrible Judgment

Anyone who happens to be a pedophile should consider any and all procedures that prevent them from acting on their disorder.  If you choose to disregard this advice, however, at least don't select a horse ranch in Texas as the best place to carry on.

A Texas father caught a man sexually assaulting his 4-year-old daughter and punched him in the head repeatedly, killing him, authorities said.

Well of course he did.

West Point Looks Back

Were you aware that the United States Military Academy's Department of History teaches students to fire 1500s matchlock muskets?  Conduct WWI-style trench warfare?

These are some interesting videos.  The old lessons become relevant again surprisingly regularly:  think of the SF guys in the early days of Afghanistan having not only to ride but to pack horses.  Rigging a pack horse is an entirely separate skill set, once well known to the American cavalry.

The lessons of trench warfare can become relevant again quickly, if only for an afternoon:  but if it does, remembering the old ways is the difference between surviving the afternoon and not.

An Older View of Marriage

I was just reading Ragnhild Johnrud Zorgati's Pluralism in the Middle Ages:  Hybrid Identities, Conversion, and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia.  There's an interesting passage I wanted to quote to you as it pertains to our occasional discussion of the nature of marriage.  We're familiar with Aquinas' natural law view of matrimony, i.e., that view of marriage that takes its form from the nature of humankind.

Aquinas lived in the 13th century, though, and his formulation out of the natural law didn't occur until the writings of Aristotle were restored to the West.  It is Aristotle, after all, who puts such an emphasis on "the nature of the thing" in determining questions about ethics and justice (and indeed even physics).  Those writings came to the Church out of Spain, especially following the conquest of Toledo in 1085.  When the Christians found themselves in possession of the great libraries of Toledo, rather than burn them (as the Mongols did to the libraries in Baghdad and Persia) they set up teams of translators.  Many Christians who spoke and read Arabic lived in the city, as well as Jewish scholars who could read multiple languages.  Translation from Arabic into Latin and other languages accessible in Europe became a focus of the Crown of Castille, which provided the funding for the efforts led by the Church.

Before that, marriage did not have the natural law reading in the West.  It still had a unique character in Christian civilization, though, opposed to the contractual reading.  Marriage was a contract in Islam.  Dr. Zorgati explains (p. 102):

According to Charles Donahue, “the most frequently made comparative statement about the Christian law of marriage, on the one hand, and the Islamic [ . . . ] or the Jewish [ . . . ], on the other, is that marriage is a sacrament in Christianity but it is not in Islam or Judaism” (Donahue, 2008, 46). In studies dedicated to Muslim marriages, it is often its contractual nature which is at the forefront. 6 However, the opposition between marriage as contract and marriage as sacrament has to be nuanced. First, there is not one Islamic marriage contract, but many, since different legal schools developed different requirements for the marriage contract, and because people could add individual stipulations to their contracts. Second, although the idea of marriage as a sacrament has roots back to Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, it was first translated into legal doctrine in the twelfth century (Donahue, 2008, 47). According to Islamic law, “marriage is a contract (ʿaqd), established by bilateral agreement” (Ali, 2008, 11). It is a mundane transaction (muʿāmala) which some jurists also saw as an act of worship (ʿibāda) since according to one ḥadīth a married person has fulfilled half of his or her religion (Ali, 2008, 11). Moreover, one of the essential features of the contract is the offer (ījāb) made by the bride’s family and the acceptance (qabūl) of the groom’s family (Ali, 2008, 11– 13). Other important elements are the dower (ṣadāq) and the role played by the guardian and the witnesses, as well as the consent of the contracting parties.

The Church's idea ran in contrast to the actual practice of the Christian people:  before the 12th century, Christians tended to prefer arranged marriages based on social class and the preservation of the stability of the family.  As the Church developed the idea of marriage as a sacrament, though, the sacred character of the bond tended to undermine family authority (Zorgati p. 104):

The insistence of the free consent of the parties must be understood in relation to the developing view that marriage constituted a sacrament. Canonists writing in the decades before Alexander III insisted on the sacramental character of marriage. For example, Peter Lombard established that marriage was one of the seven sacraments of the Church, whereas Hugh of Saint Victor explored the etymology of ‘sacrament’ that he thought corresponded to ‘holy sign’ (sacrum signum). 10 Hence, in addition to the received idea that the relationship between husband and wife was analogous to the relationship between Christ and the Church— a mystery, or sacrament, according to Saint Paul— he saw marriage as a sign of the mutual love between the soul and God. This new idea had, according to Donahue, an impact on the doctrine of free consent in marriage which developed at the same time: “A theology that sees in marriage a sign of the mutual yearning of the soul for God and of God for the soul would tend to emphasize, as Hugh does, the element of choice in marriage, and would tend to exclude the choice of anyone else as being relevant to the question of the formation of marriage” (Donahue, 2008, 54). 

That's an interesting view, and one that is in contrast with the view that Aquinas came to in the next century.  The principal end of matrimony in that view, derived from "the nature of the thing," is filling the need for humanity to reproduce itself across generations:  not only to procreate, but to educate and develop children so they are able to sustain themselves and support the greater society of which they are part.

Unlike the Islamic and Jewish contractual view, the Christian view permitted the two parties who loved each other to come together regardless of their rank in society, but only by their own free choice.  Also unlike the contractual views, however, divorce was forbidden.  The Love that could unify a man and a woman of different ranks into one flesh was a miracle.  None should dare to live in defiance of such a miracle.

No idle hands

This pattern is absorbing me as thoroughly as the golden Ring in Frodo's head:  day or night, all I want to do lately is crochet it.  When I finish a length sufficient for a bedskirt in this thick "bedspread weight" thread, I think I'll start a new one in a very fine thread, to edge the pillowcases with.

With All Due Respect, Have You Gentlemen Lost Your Minds?

InstaPundit approvingly cites Walter Russell Mead:

Air conditioning in warm regions uses far less energy than heating in cold regions. 

So if you want to help save the planet, move out of Vermont and get yourself to Alabama where people know how to live in harmony with Mother Gaia. Moving out of New England could be the purest form of environmental activism; your selfish, earth destroying choice of living in Massachusetts in killing us all. And as for Canada, Gaia’s message is clear: shut it down, now. The Germans for their part could help the planet by moving to Spain and Greece; this might also help with Europe’s financial woes. 

Perhaps the blue model politicians whose tax and spend policies are driving businesses and residents out of their states are smarter than they look. They could be green activists, steadily working to save the earth by driving people out of the northeast. We look forward to green activists introducing legislation in Congress to levy new taxes on those whose choice to live in cold states imposes costs on the more virtuous and eco-friendly inhabitants of Texas and South Carolina.

It only seems fair. You do care about the planet, don’t you?

Am I seriously reading a professor from South Carolina and another from Tennessee suggesting that what we need is for more Yankees to move down South?  Is this what you want for the good people of Alabama?

(I haven't forgotten you, Raven!  But still:  Bernie Sanders voters moving to Alabama?  Madness.)

RIchard Feynman is my hero

This is from a oft-quoted speech, Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Cal Tech, but I never can get enough of it:

This long history of learning how not to fool ourselves — of having utter scientific integrity — is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. 

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I far as I can tell, everything Feynman ever wrote is worth reading, especially "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and "Q.E.D."  The first two are reminiscences; the third is one of the best pieces of popularized science I've ever read.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Instructions from the Bench

The judge in A.W.'s case advocates for how he thinks the matter should be settled.

THE COURT: –You’ve decided to battle, and he comes back. And see, you’re — you — you’re the kind of guy, you don’t want to get into this to settle this, mano y mano. You want to get all these friends who got nothing else to do with their time, in this judge’s opinion, because — my God, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I haven’t got enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do. And I thought by retirement, I would have less to do. I got more! Because everybody knows I’m free! So they all come to me. But you, you are starting a — a conflagration, for lack of a better word, and you’re just letting the thing go recklessly no matter where it goes. I mean, you get some — and I’m going to use word I (ph) — freak somewhere up Oklahoma, got nothing better to do with his time, so he does the nastiest things in the world he can do to this poor gentleman. What right has that guy got to do it? 

WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor. 

THE COURT: Well, he’s — you incited him. 

WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though. 

THE COURT: Forget Bradenburg [sic]. Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world. But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly. 

WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor. 

THE COURT: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast. I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission. But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city. And it was really fair. When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck. 

WALKER: Well, Your Honor, what– 

THE COURT: –That ended it. You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.

So, you know, I guess you know what the court in Maryland thinks you should do next.   If anyone complains, tell them the judge so instructed you from the bench.

Considering the President's Economic Vision

The ads are already out:  President Obama said at a press conference that "the private sector is doing fine."  Republicans are playing the clip of those few words, merry in the sense that it demonstrates that the President is out of touch.

Let's consider the remark in context, though, because it's a revealing description of how he thinks about the economy.

The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone.  

The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government  and who don't have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

What's really interesting about this set of remarks is not the factual claim, but the interpretation of the facts.  The facts cited are roughly correct:  for example, government jobs really have declined rapidly during the Obama administration.  The reason is roughly what he says it is:  lots of state and local governments operate under balanced budget amendments, and aren't free to deficit-spend past their eyeballs, hair, and ten-gallon hat.

What we're left with, then, is the interpretation of the facts.  It's pretty clear that the recovery is unusually anemic by historic standards.  It's also true that the 4.3 million jobs 'created' haven't made up for the number of jobs lost:  when you take account of the number of people who have left the workforce entirely, things look different.

Also, we can see that the private jobs that do exist are objectively worse than the jobs that used to exist.  Consider the movement from full-time to part-time jobs by employers -- a way of avoiding having to provide the benefits that have become an expected part of full-time labor in America, and thus a way of paying workers lower total compensation for each hour of work.  Or consider the increasing classification of lower-wage jobs as "seasonal" rather than "part-time."  A seasonal worker can be paid below minimum wage.  And of course, raises and bonuses for lucky workers who do still have full-time jobs are not much forthcoming, while the costs of energy and food are spiking.

All this means that workers are being pinched horribly:  many can't find work, and if they can it pays less than it used to pay, especially relative to the costs they encounter.  They may now  have to buy benefits on the open market, where they are also more expensive.  Companies are finding people will take these jobs in spite of the vastly reduced compensation, though, because there are so many people who have no work that the market value of your work is just less than it used to be.  Presumably you aren't a worse worker, but you're not worth as much anymore.

This is interpreted as "fine."  OK; that's the Republicans' point.

What I find as interesting, though, is the complaint about the shrinking of government.  What the President really finds to be out of order is that state and local governments are having to respond to the economic crisis by tightening belts.  The main thing he wants to fix is to achieve higher levels of government employment.

The thing is, though, this was a policy decision by the electorates of these states and localities.  They can change the laws themselves, if they want to do so.  What they decided was that, during hard times when tax revenues are lower, government should spend less.  That means cutting some of the nice things that we enjoy government doing -- parks and recreation services, librarians, and so forth -- as well as being more careful with essential services.  Perhaps taxes or fees can be raised to pay for these, but if not, services must be more carefully allocated so as to do with less.

If people get tired of this, they can vote to rescind balanced budget amendments.  They want it this way; and at various times, 32 states have passed resolutions asking for a Constitutional Convention to require the Federal government to act this way as well.

So what we have here is a stark difference of opinion, among broad sections of the public, about how government should respond to fiscal crises.  The President is painting this as a government failure, but in fact it's the state and local governments acting exactly the way their citizens want them to act.

There's another issue behind the decline in government jobs.  The failure of Congress to pass a budget for years now has led to tremendous uncertainty; combined with the failure of the so-called "super-committee," even many Federal departments are going to get cut and nobody can be quite sure how big the cuts will be, or whether Congress will finally move to avoid them.  Thus, even some Federal departments -- certainly this is true for DOD -- have great uncertainty that is keeping them from starting new projects or hiring new people.

This last is a much clearer case of government failure.  Congress has failed as an institution, but not in failing to provide extra goodies for state and local governments to use in dodging the will of their constituents.  Congress has failed to do its most basic duty for the good order of the Federal government.

That's the one aspect of the situation the President didn't talk about.  He sees a problem where state and local governments are acting appropriately according to the mandate they have received from their citizens; he sees no problem where Congress is blatantly failing to perform its most basic function.

The private sector?  Well, whether or not you agree that it's "fine," it should be obvious that it's not of particular interest to him.

Let Me Just Say...

...that I am always surprised by how much energy there is in a big white oak hitting the ground.

Venus transit

My husband found me this spectacular shot of the transit. I forgot to mention in my prior post why people went to such trouble to view the transit every century or so from as many spots on the globe as they could manage. (Captain Cook, for instance, arranged to watch it from the South Pacific.) The purpose was to use the parallax effect to estimate the distance of Venus from the Sun. Astronomers already had a pretty good idea of the relative size of various planetary orbits, but hadn't figured out a way to put an absolute measurement on any of them. Accurate measurements of the timing of the Venus transit from distant spots on Earth permitted a triangulation that yielded not only the distance of Venus from the Sun but also, by extension, the distance of the other planets.

The stages of grief

I can't find a direct link to this video on YouTube, so you just have to click through to the HotAir article, which also has another amusing clip, but it's the Jon Stewart routine that really cracked me up.

Something tells me these guys may not enjoy the rest of 2012.

The Soque

This clip will never get old.



Heh.

Authorized. Lock it Down.

"Siri, kill that guy:  Drones might get voice controls."

Once again, Shlock Mercenary is ahead of the curve.

Sen. Chambliss on SWATting

One of my Senators, Saxby Chambliss, has taken a hand in the SWATting business.  I particularly appreciate this part of his letter to Attorney General Holder:

I appreciate your attention to this matter, and I look forward to your response no later than June 29, 2012. 

What was it they used to say about a mailed fist in a velvet glove?

Trying to Sort out the Numbers on Wisconsin

One of the claims being made about Wisconsin is that it represents a lesson about how money, post Citizens United, is now purchasing elections.  That seems like a potentially serious concern no matter where you sit:  even if you're entirely sanguine about the effect of money on elections (taking fundraising capacity as a sort of proxy for competence), it makes it hard to draw lessons for the November race because the Romney/Obama contest likely will be on fairly even terms.

However, looking around at the numbers being floated today, I'm not sure what lesson to draw.  Here are some things being reported:

1)  $63.5M total was spent on the elections, with $22M coming from outside superPACs.  Union money amounted to around $5.5M, although the wording of the story makes the precise figure a little unclear.  There was an eight-to-one advantage for the Republican candidate for governor over the Democrat.

2)   Big Labor spent $21M on the elections.  Democrats and their backers spent $23.4M, with "outside groups" who were against Republicans spending $18.6M.  I'm not clear from the wording here whether that 18.6M is out of the $23.4, or additional.

3)  $44M total was spent on the elections, with Democrats outspending Republicans $23.4M to $20.5M.  There was a Democratic advantage even on outside spending, with outside Democrat-leaning money coming to $18.6M to Republican outsiders $15.9M.

There's a big difference in the lessons to learn here, depending on whether story 1 is correct, or story 3 is correct.  Story 2 shares some figures with story 3, but that may be simply because they are sharing sources.  Until we know what number set is correct, it's hard to judge what the lesson is.  It could vary from "having more money is the main thing" to "having more money didn't help."

Sweet Mental Revenge

In honor of the Wisconsin recall, a little song by our own Waylon Jennings.  There are some lessons in the analogy.  Once we were all on the side of the firefighter's unions; once we loved them.  Why not?  They fought to defend the principle that the firemen who protected us all deserved the best we could give them.  Now, well... like the teacher's unions, we find ourselves paying so much for retired members that we can no longer afford to continue the function that originally earned our gratitude and honor.

So here we are.



Here is another version, a little more recent.  It makes a nice contrast.  Waylon Jennings always wanted the style to change and update with the times; he would have been pleased, I think.

Wisconsin blowout

Wisconsin voters spanked big labor today in its efforts to oust Governor Scott Walker and his lieutenant.  In the 2010 race between the same candidates, Walker beat Barrett by 5%.  Tonight, according to both Fox and MSNBC, the advantage looks to be about 20%, though the L.A. Times is still predicting a "photo finish."

Anno Domini 774

A mysterious source of radiation was captured in tree rings sometime from 774 to 775.  Scientists say it wasn't solar flares or supernovae; it's some mystery what it might have been.

I'd just like to note the entry from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for that year.

This year the Northumbrians banished their king, Alred, from York at Easter-tide; and chose Ethelred, the son of Mull, for their lord, who reigned four winters. This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset; the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford; and wonderful serpents were seen in the land of the South-Saxons.

Now, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a pretty sober document.  Most of the entries were made by monks, recording the chief events of the year.  However, once in a while one does get a surprising claim -- for example, see the entry for the year A.D. 793, the year the Vikings first appeared in England and plundered the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Still, in spite of the occasional entry that contemporary readers are inclined to reject, it's generally a reliable source for information.  If they say a red crucifix appeared in the heavens that year, I'd be inclined to consider that as a possible physical description of whatever it is that caused the strangeness in the tree rings.

Point of Parliamentary Procedure, Lileks:

James Lileks is not happy with the soda ban in NYC.  He's also a little irritable about people who refer to sodas as "poison."  He has a few examples of the difference between things like d-CON and things like Coca-Cola, and then adds:

Oh but she has a six ounce glass bottle, and now we have redonkulous sizes! Yes. That's true. And I apologize for reviving the word Redonkulous. But if soda is poison, then portion size is irrelevant. The Mr Yuk stickers don’t say “call 911 but only if you drank a lot of bleach. A little is okey-doke, though." So it's not a poison unless you drink huge amounts all the time, which is also true of shampoo and vodka and sugary lemonade little kids sell at card tables on the corner in summer, and motor oil. Right? So it's not poison.

Actually, the way d-CON works is through an anticoagulant that my grandmother used to take by prescription for her heart condition.  Also, a little chlorine bleach -- two drops per quart of water according to this government-issued pamphlet -- is a useful disinfectant for drinking water in many situations.

The distinction between "poison" and "not poison" is actually pretty hard to draw.  Plain water can kill you if you drink too much of it.

Catching Bank Robbers in Colorado

So, on the one hand, they did catch the guy.

On the other hand, the reporter has a good point.  What happens if the bank robber decides to open fire, now that you've handcuffed every single adult in the area?

For that matter, what justifies putting chains on free men and women when you know that almost none of them are guilty?  The assumption that it is OK to chain people up at the convenience of the state is the sort of thing that strikes me as fundamentally wrong in a free country.

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.