Shifting the Risk

One of the success stories of the recent decades has been the decline in the crime rate.  Rape, especially, has plummeted:

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

What if the rate hasn't fallen, but merely been shifted out of sight?

Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons....  After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

The article is by a progressive, and suggests a place where there is an opportunity for left/right political compromise.

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends. The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis.

So let's think this through.  We don't want to reform the system in such a way that we lose the benefit of having all the rapists out of the general society:  that's clearly a good thing.  What we do want is to reform th system so that (a) rapists don't continue to prey on a different population, and (b) we spend less money on prisons and prison guards.

That suggests a two-pronged approach.  Rape should carry the death penalty, in or out of prison:  it is obvious that rapists shouldn't be released from prison, but their containment exposes us to this problem.  Killing them is the right response.

The second part of the approach concerns the drug war, which I think we need to declare a sad failure.  Some movement to legalize most recreational drugs -- even if we do so with controls such as requiring a prescription and regular oversight by a doctor -- makes more sense than continuing to imprison so many people whose main crime was to desire a different way of getting high than whiskey.  The probable expenses of doing so are greatly outweighed by the savings involved in not having to have so many prisons, and not having to support so many prisoners and guards.  We would be a better society, too, than one which tolerates hundreds of thousands of people we have rendered helpless to be raped each year while they are under our alleged protection.

Governors Refuse to Implement PPACA

Politico has a headline that is rather striking, but the emphasis is probably not wholly wrong.  One of the warning signs that Eric Blair and I used to talk about, years back, was the states organizing in defiance of the Federal government.  The refusal to abide by orders here has been licensed by SCOTUS, in the recent Roberts decision.

For now, then, the refusal is entirely legal, and does not represent a crisis -- just a defiance.  The use of state governments to openly oppose the Federal, though, is something that bears watching.  State governments are quite powerful even individually when compared to protest movements or political rallies.

Amazing what you can do with tree rings

A new Nature article reports a cooling trend for the last 2,000 years suggested by tree ring data.  The cooling trend is statistically correlated with orbital mechanics but uncorrelated with CO2 levels.   Commenters at Watts Up With That quickly pointed out that the sample was regional (Finland) and that tree-ring data articles published to date have been notoriously unreliable.  As one put it:

The divergence problem is a mathematical artifact of calibration.  Formally known as “selection on the dependent variable”, it is a statistical flaw in the methodology that creates bias in the results.  This bias leads to divergence at the calibration boundaries, and misleading results over the proxy period. 

In other words, it isn’t the trees that are at fault.  It is the knuckleheads looking at the tree cores that have improperly applied amplifier technology to statistics, thinking they were inventing a better way to look at noisy data.  What they invented instead was a way to amplify noise, while making it look like signal.  They fooled not only themselves, but most of the world as well.

"Divergence," in the climatology context, refers to the discrepancy between thermometer data and tree-ring temperature inferences in periods when we have access to both.  Thermometer and tree-ring data agreed reasonably well during the last 150 years until about 20 years ago, when they began to diverge sharply.  AGW skeptics infer from this that the thermometer readings are being jiggered, a charge that involves controversies over climate scientists' doctoring of data, refusal to reveal basic data, cherry-picking of temperature sensor sites, and location of too many sites near urban heat islands.  AGW believers infer from the same divergence that tree-ring data are less accurate than thermometer data, and therefore that past warming periods deduced from ancient tree-ring records may have been overestimated.  Part of the excitement over the new Nature article (in both AGW camps, skeptic and believer) is that it does not suffer from the divergence problem; its tree-ring data match up well with thermometer data in the recent period.

A draft? Really?

I've discussed this sort of crap previously. As I noted here, Do your duty. 

While We're Doing Music

Try this one, from Benny Goodman.   

This particular recording is from his set at Carnegie Hall, and it's been digitally cleaned up.  I have the CD set ostensibly from one of the original sets of recording tapes that Goodman had squirreled away in his attic, found later, and released.  The CD set is deliberately not cleaned up, which the quasi-purist in me appreciates, but I like the cleaned up version of Sing, Sing, Sing, also. 

What really attracts me to this piece though, other than my liking for Big Bands and swing music, is the free-flowing extempore performance.  The basic piece is a three-minute dance song, but near the end of the Carnegie performance, the band was well fired up and into their music.  Krupa, probably with Goodman's prior permission, blew the piece into a jam session, and the main musicians each got a long-ish solo, with Krupa's drums both underlying the sets and bridging them, tying them all together.  And there's a bit of byplay as Goodman seems to get into a loop in his second set, and Krupa's drums jump in to prod him.  The piece then moves to an absolutely cold piano solo by Jess Stacy.

Enjoy.

Eric Hines

Dawsonville Pool Room Update

The Dawsonville Pool Room is still closed, even though the state has lifted the liens filed against it.  Apparently the IRS became interested in the question of filing liens of their own once they heard about the state action, and so is currently investigating whether or not to do so.  The owner wants to meet with them to arrange a payment plan, so that he can re-open the place, but they won't even meet with him until they finish their internal paperwork process.

The community is stepping up, however.

A unique beauty pageant, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on July 14 at the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, is the first planned event to "Help Save the Pool Room."

The next day on July 15 a concert will be held at Veterans Memorial Park featuring local musician Dell Conner. Other local, family-friendly bands will also appear on stage from 3 to 10 p.m.

The following weekend, on July 21, a car and bike show will be held at the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame beginning at 4 p.m.

Accounts have also been set up at United Community Bank and First Citizens Bank of Georgia to "Save the Pool Room."

It's amazing how much charity is pouring out from the community just to try to fix the deranged behavior of its government.  We could be using this charity for other things if the government wasn't making problems for us to fix.

For that matter, if the government really wants some money, why not just let them reopen the place and earn it?

Man "ist was er isst"

Or to update Feuerbach to the 21st century, you are what you spend, at least when it comes to evaluating your creditworthiness.  The FTC claims that credit card companies are jacking up rates on consumers who use credit cards for marriage counseling or massage parlors.  (But I understand that credit card companies no longer are accepting charges from medical marijuana clinics, which, bummer.)  So far, squinty-eyed meanies at the card issuing banks are relying only on rough impressions based on which merchants you frequent, but a movement is afoot to get a finer-grained picture by analyzing the SKU codes for the individual products you purchase.

I have only a rudimentary sense of privacy in most areas of my life.  I honestly don't care who knows what I buy, and can only be amused by attempts to understand me on that basis.  If anything I suffer from a sense of being unknown, inaccessible.  I'm exactly the kind of customer a merchant should try to charm by offering a product whose choice was intelligently informed by real information about my preferences; I would be far from offended.

I admit to a little curiosity about whether my spending patterns portray me as a potential deadbeat, but I figure that, with a 35-year credit history of actually paying my bills, any other information the card issuer gets is gravy.  They must think I'm the Holy Grail of customers.  When they cut off my credit, we'll know the entire financial industry has melted down.

Bitter clingers or clueless Pollyanas?

Who's happy?  According to Arthur C. Brooks, the jackpot goes to "married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids)" (self-reporting as happy at a rate of 52%) vs. "single, secular, liberal people without kids" (14%).  Does this mean, Brooks asks, that conservatives are "simply inattentive to the misery of others," so that "conservatives are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss"?  Brooks suggests a thought experiment in which data showed that liberals were happier, and conservatives questioned whether the explanation was that ignorant liberals "are unperturbed by the social welfare state’s monstrous threat to economic liberty."  In any case, that's not what the data show.

The conclusion that conservatives are happier is one I've read before, but what was new here was data showing that extremists are happier than moderates.  The happiness scale runs from sunny extreme conservatives (48% happy) to sort-of happy extreme liberals (35%) to glum moderates (26%).  I guess that means people like certainty and are happier landing on a secure belief that many things deserve to be preserved in their traditional form.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

The love-hate relationship with Mom 'n' Pop

Why, Bookworm asks, do leftists love Mom 'n' Pop in retail stores, but hate them in medicine?  WalMart is evil incarnate, but national health care is the bee's knees.  I think the answer lies in whether the entity is the enemy.  If so, the bigger the scarier; if not, the smaller the less effective.  The enemy is institutions driven by the profit motive, naturally.  It is a leftist dream that medicine can function without any profit motive -- as long as they're not the ones expected to work for free, or even for below union wages.

Bookworm's commenters discuss whether and how they use WalMart, and what kind of competitors can stay in business.  Our nearest small town sports a WalMart.  It's where we go for a variety of basic supplies, when we have to, as long as we don't mind getting stuck with a bottom-of-the-line product that can't be expected to hold up long.  We patronize the smaller local stores when we don't mind paying higher prices for better quality or for help from knowledgeable salesmen.  Local stores that don't stock better quality or provide knowledgeable salesmen don't stay in business, but I don't blame WalMart for that.

One commenter notes that on-line shopping has taken on the role that Sear's mail-order catalogs once did:  bringing a variety of goods to rural people at affordable prices.  Mail-order certainly is our primary alternative to WalMart here.

Hank Williams, Sr., Part Two

Because of his centrality to the form, we need to spend a little more time with Hank Williams, Sr.

Although he was the exemplar for the hard country songs, he also sang songs rooted in the gospel music that was one of the two main streams of traditional country music.



This music has always been eschatological in the South.  The world will melt away in the fires, so soon to come, that will rain down from Heaven.



And we all know who is the rider of the pale horse:



Hear him cite book, chapter and verse in this song.  It's from 1949.  It makes some sense, at the hour of the start of the long Cold War.



So we must understand this tension to be at the root of the music he is building.  It is built around a sincere faith, but also it is rooted in an honest admission of sin.  He does not claim to be better than he is.  He does not think that his sins prove his strength.  This honest speech is the root of the power of his song.

The Right to Choose... for You

I read James Taranto's attack on Dr. Shari Motro's recommendation that we establish procedures to force men to pay women for pregnancies resulting from sex with said women.  Taranto raises some good points about the function of incentives, and it's a fairly thoughtful reply.

I'd like to raise a less thoughtful response to this particular suggestion:

One of the potential ramifications is that men might be called upon to help support their pregnant lovers before birth, even if the pregnancy is ultimately terminated or ends in miscarriage. They might be asked to chip in for medical bills, birthing classes and maternity clothes, to help to cover the loss of income that often comes with pregnancy, or to contribute to the cost of an abortion.

Emphasis added.

I'm willing to accept that a man who gets a woman pregnant ought to take responsibility for providing for her needs during pregnancy.  That all makes sense to me, although Taranto's objections regarding incentives do seem like relevant concerns.

But there can be no accommodation on the question of forcing a man to pay for the abortion of his own child.  It's hard enough that we require a man to endure the killing of a child he may want, if the woman carrying the child decides that she prefers it dead.  There can be no moral argument for forcing him to pay for the poisoning of his own flesh and blood.

Continuing Education: Hank Williams, Sr.

There is no figure in late-20th century country music that towers nearly as high as Hank Williams.  That doesn't mean he had a happy life.  He was an alcoholic, refused service in WWII because he was injured in a rodeo, a man whose band dissolved around him because they were all drafted, and whose replacements refused to work with him because he was so often drunk; and a man dead at the age of thirty from a combination of an ice storm, alcohol, and morphine.

When he sings about being "a rolling stone" on the lost highway?  That's 1948.  Bob Dylan did that line in 1965.

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Hank Williams to country music.  You can attribute to him most of the focus on drinking and lost love, and lives wrecked by these same things.  Even today, you'll hear the old joke:  "What happens if you play a country record backwards?  You get your job back, your wife back, and your dog back."  He's why that joke means anything.

Here is a famous duel inspired by the idea of love at the honky tonk, and who was at fault for the end of such love:

Even Patsy Cline sang about the longing for adultery:



-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Draw a line there.  Everything that follows is from a later period, and is just to show how important the earlier things were to them.

One of the most popular singers of the 1970s made this tribute, which sums it up.  The sexual revolution brought the dissolution of alcoholic honky-tonkers to middle class life:  and Hank Williams was their poet, the one who managed to put how it all felt into words.

Or take David Allen Coe's word for it.  An important part of his claim in this song is that he can sing "every song that Hank Williams ever wrote."  And he can:  but we'll get to him, and the Outlaws, in due time.  For now, the point is that Hank Williams is the touchstone.



Well, let's do one more Outlaw song to make the point.  This is genuflection to the thing that was gone by the time they were singing:  but they meant every word of it.

Oh, give it a rest

Some suggestions from "Pour Me Coffee" for responses to trolls.

It is solely your responsibility to find the hilarity.  No humor explanations. 

Please tell me more about how I might use my time and talent to perfectly match your unique sensibilities! 

I appreciate your candor, but it is none of my business what you think of me. 

I confess to the exaggeration you identified.  This technique is sometimes used in humor.

H/t Rocket Science.

Wildlife overpasses

These are cool.

"That ^$&*%(*& particle"

I loved Rocket Science's intro to a roundup of coverage on this week's blockbuster scientific development:

A particle not unlike the Higgs boson was discovered to rapturous applause.  No really, a room full of people applauded like it was a sports game.  It was brilliant.  One guy said “I was overwhelmed by the data analysis” and started choking up a bit.  We were two seconds away from someone chucking their panties at the boson and then fainting.

Having read some serious nonsense about this discovery lately, I was happy to find a list of links of respectable attempts to explain the business to those of us who lack any kind of a clue about particle physics, in addition to some second-generation links from associated comments.  I can't honestly say any of these were tremendously helpful to me (the subject remains over my head), except that they seemed less silly than what the newspapers were running.

An Atlantic piece featuring a mini-lecture received at a July 4th picnic.

How the Higgs field is like water that fills up some particles and is expelled by others.

A short video lecture from The Guardian, a publication that's producing better-than-average written articles as well.

I like this animation of a brief explanation of what the experiments are trying to measure and how.

W100

xkcd: The Agincourt Gambit

So, my question for the amusement of the readers:  how would you distinguish this from the Crécy gambit or the Poitiers gambit?  What would the field look like in each variation?

Also, is it correct that the French are white in this variation?  The English archers moved first at Agincourt.

Weirdness of Physics

I got a battery-operated mower for this season: I needed a new mower, wanted to try out the technology, and given the hour at which I mow on a Texas Sunday—before it gets too hot—I wanted something quieter than a traditional gasoline-powered machine.  However, unlike modern gasoline-powered mowers, this one is human propelled.

The mower's design facilitates dismounting the battery for recharging between mowings; for me, this amounts to a walk of some 30 feet from my wife's garden shed where I store the mower to the garage, where I recharge the battery.

That's a long introduction to get to the weird physics matter.  I've noticed, now, some 3+ months into the mowing season, that the battery is quite light when it's fully charged and I'm carrying it out to the mower.  However, after it's given up all those electrons to the mowing operation, the battery has gotten quite heavy for the carry back to be recharged.

Hmm….

Eric Hines

Mayberry

 Mark Steyn takes on the subject I'm so addicted to:  the problem of balance between anonymous markets and warm families as a model for human communities.  I've often argued that what works brilliantly under our own roofs is a disaster on a large scale:

In their book The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore argue that, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would have broken up long ago.  But hey, that’s no reason not to try it!  In a land where everything else is supersized, why not government?  Obituaries for the late Andy Griffith generally glossed over his career finale as a pitchman for Obamacare.  But he was a canny choice to sell the unsellable, for is not “health” “care” “reform” the communitarian virtues of beloved small-town Mayberry writ large?  The problem is you can’t write Mayberry large.  And, if you attempt it, it leads not to Mayberry but to Stockton, Calif., and to a corrupt, dysfunctional swamp.  A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms.  It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland.  The road to hell isn’t paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.

My own neighborhood is much closer to Mayberry than to a Wall Street populated by Gordon Gekkos.   We dispense almost entirely with formal enforcement mechanisms and operate, if not on the basis of pure charity, at least on an extremely loose barter system that's more like the old social convention of alternating entertainments than like a ledger.  But it's a small neighborhood, and the close-knit aspect is earned, to some extent, by each getting to know the others and demonstrating a willingness to act right. We don't try to incorporate even the local town into the system, let alone the nearest city.  But shouldn't we be trying to expand the brotherhood of man rather than build walls around our own private Camelot?  I believe that, so the question for me is what's most likely to succeed in that ambition.  Experience tells me that giving strangers respect as autonomous beings, but extending charity to them if necessary, is more likely to bring people together evenetually over a wider and wider area than encouraging each to treat the group as his private teat.  I don't know why dependency on strangers corrodes most people, but I'm convinced it does.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Continuing Education: Western Swing

Let's take the Hank Williams song from the last post on the subject as a baseline for the unity of country and Western music. The song dates to 1950, and it stands at something like the end of a trend in which the two genres had grown together in popular culture. Now let's look at how that baseline point was formed. The driving force was Hollywood, whose appetite for cowboy movies through the 1930s and 1940s included a developing taste for Western music. We had singing cowboys, who started off by singing traditional Western folk songs. The Sons of the Pioneers and Roy Rogers (originally together, later separate) were probably the most famous of these, from 1933. Here's a traditional Western tune.

 

 As cowboy movies continued to be popular through the 1930s and 1940s, the musical genre began to take on aspects of another genre very popular in the '40s: swing music. Here's the same group kicking up their heels a bit in a film from 1944.

 

Another band that was at the forefront of Western Swing music was Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.  I believe it's correct to ascribe the introduction of the steel guitar to them.  That first happened in 1935, when the band had already included a saxophone and other instruments more commonly found in jazz and swing music.



Now here's Bing Crosby making the point about the change that had overcome the Old West even in its music.



So this is the music that Hank Williams' alter-ego was performing.  It was a genre that had national attention and acclaim for a couple of decades.  It remained popular through the 1950s, when Westerns were still very popular in Hollywood, and even more popular on television.

Hollywood Westerns from the '50s, though, began to move away from Western Swing and back toward traditional Western music out of a desire to use the Western movie as a vehicle to present more serious films.  In Rio Grande, for example, the cavalry regimental singers return to traditional roots music in order to achieve authenticity. It is therefore ironic that the authentic Irish rebel song they picked for the Irish soldiers to sing, "The Bold Fenian Men," actually wasn't composed until the 20th century.

UPDATE:  Turns out we have a highly educated and well-connected fan of Western Swing in the Hall.  I petitioned Gringo for some favorites, and here's what he picked (see discussion).

Ida Red shows Bob and the Texas Playboys playing an old folk tune- or should we say fiddle tune.




Trouble in Mind shows what Bob Wills can do with a blues song. Al Striklin, my third hand connection to the Texas Playboys, is on the piano.




Home in San Antone is a movie clip with some good, swinging instrument solos. 



Take Me Back to Tulsa has a rare appearance of brother Luke Wills on the vocals. Tommy Duncan did most of the vocals.This is one of Bob’s best known tunes.

Two Interesting Articles...

...on subjects we occasionally discuss.

A female Marine with combat experience argues against the admission of female Marines into the Infantry officer program.  In doing so, she makes a number of points Cassandra has often made, but one that I think may be new to the discussion.  The author's own experience with medical attrition as a combat engineer includes a harrowing list of symptoms including infertility:  and that is from a successful tour, without injury from enemy action.

This said, we need only to review the statistics from our entry-level schools to realize that there is a significant difference in the physical longevity between male and female Marines. At OCS the attrition rate for female candidates in 2011 was historically low at 40 percent, while the male candidates attrite at a much lower rate of 16 percent. Of candidates who were dropped from training because they were injured or not physically qualified, females were breaking at a much higher rate than males, 14 percent versus 4 percent. The same trends were seen at TBS in 2011; the attrition rate for females was 13 percent versus 5 percent for males, and 5 percent of females were found not physically qualified compared with 1 percent of males. Further, both of these training venues have physical fitness standards that are easier for females; at IOC there is one standard regardless of gender. The attrition rate for males attending IOC in 2011 was 17 percent. Should female Marines ultimately attend IOC, we can expect significantly higher attrition rates and long-term injuries for women....

Opening combat arms MOSs, particularly the infantry, such observers argue, allows women to gain the necessary exposure of leading Marines in combat, which will then arguably increase the chances for female Marines serving in strategic leadership assignments.... Even if a female can meet the short-term physical, mental, and moral leadership requirements of an infantry officer, by the time that she is eligible to serve in a strategic leadership position, at the 20-year mark or beyond, there is a miniscule probability that she’ll be physically capable of serving at all. Again, it becomes a question of longevity.

When we were talking about Ranger school, some of us noted that the odds were that there would be a loss to the force of excellent officers by putting them in such a physically demanding situation.  However, the issue of longevity is new:  even the ones who do survive the training may not be able to survive twenty years of active service to attain admission to the general officer ranks.  If we are doing a cost/benefit analysis in terms of the good of the force, then, the costs are even higher than I had thought; and the expected benefit begins to vanish entirely.

The second article is over at National Review, a writer named David French does something that I know Elise and Cassandra both wish we did more often:  he attacks the problem set that conservatives often attack as arising from "feminism," but without attributing it to (or even mentioning) feminism or feminist groups.  Rather, he attributes the problem set to "the sexual revolution."

This strikes me as kind of a good point.  What's really objectionable is the destruction of the family, the prevalence of abortion, the translation of 'pursuit of happiness' to mean 'chasing after desires by adults, regardless of the cost to their families and children.'  It seems natural to look to the foremost defenders of unfettered abortion when you go to complain about abortion; but it may be that the underlying issue he identifies is the real source of the problem.

No, No, Joe:

As a service to Dad29, who doesn't know much about country music, a song. This one is by Hank Williams, Sr., when he was singing under a stage name ("Luke the Drifter"). You'll probably like it, both for the anti-Communist lyrics and the Western swing sound.  Note the steel guitar.  This was originally a Hawaiian instrument, but Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys introduced it into Western music in the 1930s.  It was a very popular sound in both country and Western music through to the 1960s.

An Excellent Annotation

"The other VC" has a great annotation of the Declaration of Independence.  It contains some highly useful and informative analysis.  This part is relevant to one of our recent discussions:

4. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men. . . .” Another overlooked line, which is of greatest relevance to our discussion of the first underlying assumption of the Constitution: the assumption of natural rights. Most emphasis today is placed on “the consent of the governed” passage that follows. But both parts of this sentence need to be reconciled. This part identifies the end of governments as securing the natural rights which the previous sentence affirms is the measure against which all government—whether of Great Britain or the U.S.—will be judged.

5. “. . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, there is a tendency to focus entirely on this portion of the sentence to the exclusion of the first part, but we should recognize both parts are there and do not mean the same thing. Although the ultimate criteria of legitimate governance is the protection of natural rights, this affirms that particular governments only gain jurisdiction to protect these rights by the consent of those who are governed. The “consent of governed” is a different idea from protecting rights. It is how to get government up and running. But it is a problematic idea in terms of rights. If you emphasize consent and de-emphasize rights, government gets empowered to do anything in the name of the people, so long as it can claim the “consent of the governed,” which is never going to be the actual consent of each and every person. So there is a tension between the first and second parts of the sentence.

 The concept is inherently limited by a natural law context.  This is true in Locke, too, although he is not as explicit:  a social contract can't legitimately do anything that people happen to agree to do.  It can't abrogate property rights, for example:  for Locke, those are pre-political natural rights, and any state that presumed to invalidate them is no longer legitimate.

My own view of legitimacy is somewhat different, but I think I agree that natural law needs to be the foundation stone.  If the Bill of Rights sets limits on the government -- or intends to do so, not that the government always listens or agrees to be so bound -- here is another, older, and more final set of limits.  There are some things that no government can legitimately do.

The Value of Compromise

Cassandra's Independence Day post warns of radicalism on the right.  Compromise is what made America:

Others saw them as cowardly traitors seeking to undermine the foundations of our system of government. Some in the anti-war movement took dissent beyond mere speech, urging soldiers and Marines to frag their officers. Violence, it seemed, did in fact solve some problems (even if one professed to abhor it). Two polar extremes, each animated by what to them seemed fundamental questions about the role of government, struggled to articulate their positions. The passion of those who hated and feared the Bush administration was matched by those who defended its actions. We were engaged in what - to us - seemed a titanic struggle to define the proper role and the legitimate authority of that government created in 1776 by men who themselves did not agree about a great many things.

A mere seven years later, Americans are still arguing about the role and legitimacy of the federal government. But the two parties do so from different sides and are motivated by different issues. Progressives, now that a Democrat occupies the Oval Office, are all in favor of a strong federal government with an assertive Executive branch. And conservatives of all stripes, now that we're out of power, fear that a strong federal government is in danger of extinguishing the freedoms we hold dear. Different freedoms, and different dreams.... Now it is conservatives who whisper of rebellion and armed resistance; of lack of consent.

These questions have faced every generation for over two centuries. They are not new to us, nor are our current discontents greater in kind or severity than the many follies and abuses that gave past generations ample cause for outrage. The old struggles divide us, still.

If I have one wish for this Fourth of July, it might be that we stop for a moment to contemplate our long history, considering both the great good and the equally great evils this nation has experienced. If we did not consider the governments of the past to be illegitimate when they made very great mistakes, by what rationale do we seek to undermine the legitimacy of our present government, however deeply we disagree with its policies?...

I'm not sure when compromise ceased being the quality that gave us our Declaration in 1776, the Articles of Confederation in 1781 and - when that minimalist framework proved insufficient to the task of governing a handful of former colonies - the Constitution in 1789 and become a threat to the principles outlined in them. The men who signed all three of these documents did not agree about a great many things. To secure their signatures and their consent to the greatest experiment in representative government the world had yet known, compromise was needed.

And if we hope to hold onto what our forebears bequeathed to us, we had better relearn the skills that made our way of life possible in the first place. 

I am not unsympathetic to the idea of compromise.  Back in 2004 -- which I didn't take to be a referendum on the legitimacy of the nation, but on whether we would or would not surrender in Iraq and to al Qaeda -- I wrote the following:

In the next years, we must remember the 55 million [who voted for Kerry]. It may be that some of them can be won over, through argument or through example, or even -- on matters not of principle -- through compromise. Even when not, we must remember that they showed that America is their country too: no one can ever again claim to be backed by the "silent majority." That majority has now spoken, but it spoke on both sides. 

We should remember that they felt all the passion and concern that we did ourselves, and found that doing everything they could only led to the defeat of their cause. That kind of defeat can weaken the Republic, which many of us are sworn to uphold. It weakens it by undermining faith and confidence in the institutions. We must take care to be sure they find fair hearing of their concerns in the institutions that conservatives now control. The government must serve them as well. We should take care to observe the tenets of Federalism, and not use the power of the Federal government to try and influence liberal states according to a general will. We should erect new walls in that regard, so that our disappointed neighbors can still live the lives they want to live in what is also their country. 

That's the kind of compromise I think is sustainable in this country, which is deeply divided on basic values.  If we can't achieve that renewed Federalism -- if we continue to insist on using the vast power of the Federal government to force compliance out of the part of America that disagrees with us -- we will have war whether we want it or not.

Nor is this new.  If we are to grant Cassandra's wish, and re-examine the way in which the nation advanced to its state of flourishing liberty, we will find only some few compromises -- and a great deal of uncompromising violence.  Even where we see compromises, we see them in the context of threats of armed rebellion, secession and disunion.  The Great Compromise arose because Southern and Northern states would not otherwise agree to be bound together.  The Compromise of 1850, which agreed that we would remain half-slave and half-free, arose because otherwise the Southern states would leave the union entirely.  It was granted only at the point of civil war.

If it were compromise that was at the root of liberty, we would have remained half-slave and half-free.  It was Lincoln's uncompromising stance, and hundreds of thousands of dead, that resulted in liberty for the slaves.  The ratification of the Reconstruction amendments was forced by military occupation.  The withdrawal of that occupation was the carrot offered in return for Southern acceptance of a Republican presidency in the Compromise of 1877.  

The late 19th century saw the rise of labor unions as a force in politics.  The compromises they won were won through strikes and clashes with the US Army, whose main duty between the end of the Civil War and the first World War was suppressing unions.  It was their willingness to keep fighting in the face of such suppression that compelled compromise.

Likewise, when desegregation of the schools was commanded by the Supreme Court of the United States, Arkansas called out its national guard in order to resist the command.  It took the 101st Airborne to make that good.  The history of desegregation -- not only in the South, but everywhere -- is marked with bombings, lynchings, terrorism, snipers, and blood.  It was achieved only because the force brought to bear in its favor overwhelmed the force brought to bear against it.  The compromise was the compromise of submitting to desegregation in return for an end to the pain.

The great lesson is that compromise comes only at the point of disunion and violence.  If we have principles we are prepared to insist upon, we must be willing to contemplate -- and indeed, to prepare for -- disunion and even civil war.

That is not to disdain compromise, or to set it aside.  It is, rather, the only way to achieve a compromise on such a basic and deeply-felt matter.  It is the way we have always treated these things.  Conflict is how liberty ever came to flourish at all.

I hope this will be of comfort to my dear friend Cassandra, to whom the murmurings of revolt on the right seem disconcerting and immoderate.  These things do not spell the end of America or its liberty:  they are the root of American liberty, and they have always been its nourishment.  It is only through such mutterings, and sometimes far more than muttering, that our compromises have been achieved.

So take heart, and look to your arms.  We may hope not to need them, but we dare not lay them aside. We must have the option of practical recourse to them if we are to compel the kind of compromise we need.

Evil shale-gas fracking corporations slash U.S. carbon footprint

Don't you hate it when the market forces changes in energy consumption that bureaucratic bullying could not?  Citing a government report, blogger John Hanger reports:

After the first quarter, the USA's 2012 [carbon] emissions are falling sharply again and may drop to 1990 levels, or just slightly above that important milestone, according to data in EIA's latest Monthy Energy Review.  .  .  .  [T]he shale gas revolution, and the low-priced gas that it has made a reality, is the key driver of falling carbon emissions, especially in the last 12 months. . . .  Shale gas production has slashed carbon emissions and saved consumers more than $100 billion per year.  Truly astonishing!

Old Husbands' Tales

Not really.  I was just having a little gender-bending fun.  The site is really called "Life's Little Mysteries," and it contains an entertaining variety of explanations.  For instance, it's possible that Gollum really would have submerged upon falling into Mount Doom, though you might have thought he would float, lava being denser than a living body.  Perhaps more to the point for those of us more likely to visit the coast than an active volcano as the summer vacation season opens, you shouldn't pee on a jellyfish sting, but pouring vinegar on it may help.

For alternative views, this scientist asserts that all home remedies commonly believed to assuage the pain of either bee or wasp stings are rubbish.  This one cites a lot of contradictory evidence regarding the treatment of fire ant stings with everything from acids to alkalines to meat tenderizers.  He adds the helpful advice that you should try either ammonia or bleach, but never mix them together, as they will release deadly chlorine gas.  Not that this should matter much outdoors, but people have been known to hurt themselves badly in enclosed bathrooms, especially poking their faces down too close to toilet boils that have been cleaned with, say, Ajax and ammonia.  This more medically oriented site says just remove the stinger, if any, wash with soap and water, and try ice, antihistamines, pain relievers, and maybe think about when you last had a tetanus booster.  I don't know if any of this works; I barely react to bees, wasps, or fire ants in any case.  I also found out this week that I'm nearly immune to a scorpion sting.  That same day, however, I found out that a bite from my own danged cat will send me to the urgent-care clinic for antibiotics to treat a thumb that's still swollen and painful now two days later (but on the mend).  Well, at least my tetanus booster was up to date.

H/t Maggie's Farm

Independence Day

Pause and reflect.

When in the course of human events  it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures....

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures....

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation...

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: 

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:...

You can make a lot of distinctions here, if you care to do so.  But there's a lot to compare, however carefully you wish to contrast.

Happy Independence Day.  Maybe it's time for a little rebellion.

UPDATE:  Dr. Mead has composed a modernized version of the Declaration.

George Washington was just as good as Bill Clinton:

Another poll to help us achieve despair.  Best Presidents Ever:

5. (tie) George Washington, +15 points (16 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) Bill Clinton, +15 points (28 percent place in top-2, 13 percent place in bottom-2)

Man, that's depressing.

The Palio

Machu Picchu

Speaking of crazy Russians, here is one who has assembled a remarkable virtual tour of Machu Picchu out of high-definition photographs.  If you haven't got the time or the money for a trip to Peru, at least you can virtually take the hike and look around!

Theme Songs

The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys settles on this for their internet theme song.  There's a significant amount of bad language, but the singer is Russian, so probably it's not even obscene by relevant community standards.  In any case, 2:37-2:50 is brilliant.

I never thought of having a theme song.  Nevertheless, I guess our theme song would have to be this.



Well, OK, it has the disadvantage of being an hour and nine minutes long.  But it's worth it, and isn't that the point?

Tact

A friend sent me this link, designed to make us miss the Great Communicator.

The verdict on the court

My husband and I have been going back and forth over whether Justice Roberts's decision can be defended.  I was inclined to stick up for him at first, but I'm coming around to the opinion that he fell into the trap of issuing an opinion tainted by politics.  That they weren't the politics his enemies predicted he would fall prey to doesn't change this conclusion.  The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal did the best job I've seen so far explaining where he went wrong:

America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes.  These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states.  For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves. 

*** 

That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power.  The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises. . . . [T]he punishments in the [current] tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows.  Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.  Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. 

*** 

His ruling, with its multiple contradictions and inconsistencies, reads if it were written by someone affronted by the government's core constitutional claims but who wanted to uphold the law anyway to avoid political blowback and thus found a pretext for doing so in the taxing power.  If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked.  The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

Cardboard tomatoes -- a mistake?

Or did they do it to us on purpose?  I always figured that tastelessness in modern tomatoes was an unintended consequence of the desire to make them firmer and easier to transport.  It's true that the worthless flavor and texture of just about all supermarket tomatoes is an unintended consequence, but not of the desire to make them as tough as tennis balls.  It was a side-effect of something far more useless:  a gene that makes the tomatoes turn uniformly red when ripe, instead of leaving unsightly patches of green.  So now they're purty, but not worth the trouble of chewing.  The linked article claims that researchers think they figured out to turn the flavor gene back on, but regulations forbade them actually to taste a research product, so they're not sure, and anyway they'd be crazy to try to market an evil GM tomato, right?

Heirloom tomatoes have escaped this fate, so it's still possible to grow a decent tomato at home.  At least, I assume it's possible for some of you.  We have terrible luck with tomatoes here, perhaps because we don't use pesticides, but perhaps even more because our climate tends to go from "too cold to bloom" to "too hot to set fruit" in the space of about a week every spring.  It makes me want to build an air-conditioned greenhouse, because a good tomato is the crown of creation.

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld

Jimbo at BLACKFIVE posted a link to this gentleman's obituary, and he's right:  it's a remarkable one, well worth reading.  His was a life well led!