Living Voices

The interest in 'social networks' has provided new evidence that several powerful ancient epics were based on real people. The Iliad, the Beowulf and the Tain Bo Cualinge, unlike many more modern stories, seem to capture real social dynamics. (Hat tip: Lars Walker.)

What about the gods, though? Were they real too? A new treatment for schizophrenia is based upon the idea that they were.

Jaynes was a psychology professor at Princeton, back in the days before psychologists had walled themselves off from literature, when he noticed that the gods in the Homeric epics took the place of the human mind. In the Iliad we do not see Achilles fretting over what to do, or even thinking much. Achilles is a man of action, and in general, he acts as the gods instruct him. When Agamemnon steals his mistress and Achilles seethes with anger, Athena shows up, grabs him by the hair, and holds him back. Jaynes argued that Athena popped up in this way because humans in archaic Greece attributed thought to the gods—that when the ancient kings were buried in those strange beehive Mycenaean tombs, when social worlds were small and preliterate, people did not conceptualize themselves as having inner speech.

Jaynes did not think that the role of the gods in the Iliad was a literary trope. He thought that people who did not refer to internal states used their brains differently and—the cognitive functions of speaking and obeying split across their unintegrated hemispheres—actually experienced some thoughts audibly. “Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips?” Jaynes asked. “They were voices whose speech and direction could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”

The treatment, by the way, is for people who experience these voices to talk back to them, and see if you can cut a deal with them. It turns out to be the case that, at least in some cases, you can: and when you try, instead of being destructive, the voices often become friendly and even helpful.

Now that makes for an interesting -- and rather daunting -- prospect. If Jaynes were right, you could learn to hear voices: you could meet the old gods. Or the old demons.

The Love of St. Sebastian

You have probably never heard this song, unless you've heard it here before.  I have never seen the film to which it pertains.  The movie is so rare that a VHS copy runs over seventy dollars.  I wonder if it isn't the most beautiful piece that Ennio Morricone ever wrote.



It isn't one of his more famous pieces, but it is one of his odes to the love that a man bears a woman.  The closest competitor in beauty I can find is his song for the love man bears to God.



He wrote a great deal more, but I find nothing so fine as these two songs of love.  Even the Overture to this work with which we began is not so powerful as the love song -- though it has its moments.  But the chief moment is the premonition of the love theme:



Of course, he's most famous for this:



But that may have been a distraction from the true thing.

At Bob's request, in honor of the gallant men who gave their lives in the Aurora theater. 

The endless I.O.U.

During the 2008 campaign, the Net began a tentative reverberation around the concept of "socialism," which had been an unfamiliar theme in recent presidential contests.  The early reaction was often the print equivalent of blank stares, as many people took a moment to look the word up in the dictionary.  I recall many discussions of whether President Obama's goals, whatever each writer guessed they might be, actually lined up well with the classical definition of socialism.

Over the last four years, the controversy has developed a louder drumbeat.  More and more writers decline to split hairs over the precise definition of socialism and instead concentrate on the relative merits of centralized vs. dispersed control over economic decisions, as well as the central question of how a society most fairly rewards the contributions of its members.  Ann Althouse is hosting a discussion of the issue this week.  One of her readers demanded to know whether she truly thought Obama was a socialist.  She replied that it was a question of whether his policies were leading in that direction, rather than whether his convictions met a doctrinaire definition.  Other readers are chiming in with methods of describing the spectrum, using the "You Didn't Build That" argument as part of their base.  As one noted, it's important to look at the traditional functions of business owners and to examine to what extent government is usurping them.  Business owners decide which products they will push and at what price.  They hire the workers they need and make their own determination of what price they need to pay to get and keep the workers they want.  When the government sets prices, when it subsidizes products it approves of, when it orders consumers to buy products, when it mandates wages and benefits, when it interferes in business-labor negotiations, when it bails out business failures, when it invests directly in failing businesses and picks new executives -- then government may not technically own the means of production, but it's swallowing up the function of owners bit by bit.

The "You Didn't Built That" controversy is inspiring a fresh look at how the members of a society reward each other.  Everyone knows that a commercial transaction in a complex society doesn't take place in a vacuum.  The most rugged free-market individualists acknowledge the importance of law and order to support a secure and predictable commercial system.  Wealthy families are not sending their young heirs to Somalia to get in on the ground floor of profitable trade opportunities.  Roads and bridges are a good thing if you want to get your products to willing buyers.  Every factory owner depends on supplies and labor to develop into marketable products.  But does that mean our system will work best if the factory owner shares more of his profit with whatever group we think is most under-rewarded this season?

The free-market system appears too mercenary for many tastes, because it rests on the assumption that no one should get anything without paying for it.  The socialist system, though, is even worse:  it assumes that we should all pay for the same things repeatedly.  The business owner somehow scraped up initial capital (by saving it, or by persuading others to save it and risk it on him) and spent it to build his plant and hire his workers.  It's not as though he passed the hat and asked his neighbors to provide him with their time and goods out of fellow-feeling.  If his business was successful, he asked people to part with money before walking out the door with whatever useful product he put out -- but he did part with a valuable product rather than taking the purchase price at gunpoint.  He used the public roads and courts and schools, but those had previously been built with taxes on businessmen like himself, and taxes continue to supported the ongoing costs of operation.  Must we all be taxed to pay for this valuable infrastructure, and then still listen to complaints that we're getting it for free, and that we owe and owe and owe for the privilege until the day we die (and even then our estates owe)?  Must employers pay wages and still feel an undischargeable debt to their workers, or society in general, for the value of the goods they produce?

That's what's wrong with the "You Didn't Build That" speech.  We actually did build that, or at least we've already paid our share of inducing other people to build it.  It's not the government's place to keep charging rent on infrastructure forever, just because its origins are diffuse.  Citizens did it, if not directly then by funding a collective program to do it via government.  There is no outstanding bill to pay, no debt of gratitude coming due.  We all need to pay enough taxes to support whatever useful things the government is doing if we want them to continue.  We don't all owe an extra duty to pay taxes in order to compensate an amorphous body of people who "got us where we are" and are now presenting a new bill for the same old service.

The Feud Over Nothing

We've been following this feud for some time here, so you may be interested in the latest salvo.

The most interesting part of the article to me is the question of an adequate definition of "nothing."  I don't think the one they propose is actually adequate.  If you shrank the universe to radius zero, there would still be fourth-dimensional extension -- that is, the universe would have been.  If you compress the time as well as the space, so that the universe in this sense never was as well as isn't anywhere, you've still got the potential for it to have been:  after all, it was, before you started shrinking.

True nothing needs to be an absence of potential, not just an absence of actuality.  It may be that there never was (in the more usual sense of the phrase) an absence of potential; if so, there was never nothing.  Existence is then necessary:  even if you reduce the universe to "nothing" in the sense the author means it, something still exists.  That field of potential still exists.

But why is there something and not nothing?  That was the original question, and all we've accomplished is getting back around to agreeing that there is something.

Heroes

Heaven knows I'd love to be writing a post about how women rose to the occasion for heroism in the Aurora movie theater.  The fact is, four young men really did.  Now is not the time for querulous feminists to discount those excellent men's sacrifice by referring to examples of moral heroism from women in the past.  Yes, Harriet Tubman is inspiring.  No, I'm not persuaded by the argument that, in holding up the young heros in Aurora for admiration and denigrating the fellow who ran and left behind his girlfriend and their child, we're being unfair and perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Just One Minute puts his finger right on it, I think, when he quotes the bit about how we all hope we're sitting next to a Todd Beamer on the airplane.  No, honey, some people are aspiring to be Todd Beamer, not sit there and wait to be rescued by him.  If you're going to be a feminist, that's the standard you have to hold yourself to.  Otherwise you join the ranks of the guy who ran like a rabbit and left his girlfriend and child behind.

Muddled missions

The USDA has a brilliant new initiative to heal the planet.

I have a better plan:  abolish the USDA.  It doesn't seem to have any idea what its mission is any more. Is it supposed to ensure reliable food production?  Fix prices?  Subsidize corn?  Promote food-stamp dependency?  Combat obesity?  Reduce the carbon footprint?  It's lurching around at cross-purposes.  Bury it at midnight, I say.

Stomp the (Right Wing) Girl!

She made a racist joke! Well, if "African" is a race... which it isn't, really... and if it's derogatory to suggest that people feed mosquitoes, which they kinda do.

However, she does support a right-wing political party. So, you know, destroying her life is entirely appropriate. Just like describing those "Anglo-Saxon" remarks by an unnamed adviser as evidence that the Romney campaign is based on "white supremacy." (Are French people white? I guess not, since they don't much care for "Anglo-Saxon" approaches to problems.)

But, hey, maybe this is an entirely proportionate response.  After all, getting into the Olympics isn't a big deal. I hear you don't even get paid for it.

UPDATE:  Apparently even corporations get this treatment.  And that works... for now.  But I wouldn't expect it to work for long.

Another Round on Gun Control

President Obama said today...

I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers and not in the hands of crooks. They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.

You mean like Chicago, which is more deadly for Americans than Afghanistan? Has been for a while; I was in Iraq when the murder rate for Baghdad dropped below Chicago's. Got lots of gun control in Chicago, too.

You know how we made Baghdad safer than Chicago? We put a lot of guys with assault rifles to walking the streets.

They could be soldiers, but they don't have to be. A properly trained citizens' militia would do a lot for bringing order to Chicago. If you want to talk about the Second Amendment, let's talk about that. Why do you want to take from the ordinary, honest citizen the capacity to protect himself, his family, and his neighborhood? Why don't you empower him instead?

Department of Circular Reasoning Department

From Politico via HotAir, this gem of an explanation from David Axelrod.  Polls show a public impression, by a 2-to-1 margin, that Obama is running a more negative campaign than Romney.  Axelrod explains that that's only because Romney is running ads accusing Obama of negative campaigning.  Now I guess we'll need a poll to determine which campaign is using ads more critical of the other's ads.

In other brilliant-campaign-strategy news, the Obama campaign is explaining that his "you didn't build that" speech didn't really say that, thus ensuring that millions more voters will view clips from the actual speech on infinite loop for the next week or so.

An Old Poem

I found a poem in an old journal tonight, one I wrote when I was still just beginning to compose. At that time I was interested in the Old Norse forms, which alliterate instead of rhyming.  It was composed in honor of my wife, imagining her as a fairy maid encountered in a wild wood, besought for a bride.

Creature, you crossed my way
Careful as a hart,
Music of the high wood.
Magic is this forest,
Magic your merry eyes,
Moon-silver, pine-green,
Ah! Long-neck, lithe and faerie,
Lustrous as sun-stroked stone.

Frost-Fearless, what
In your fine hands
Speaks of seams,
Sewn garments shining,
Or beasts made boldly,
Brought from cold clay
And fed with fire?

Wild Quest! Wait, Lady,
Wander with me,
Be faithful, stay:
Though far we fare
Our wandering home
Will linger at last.
For your rest I'll raise a tower:
Raise, and make it mine.

Original Gangster

We don't do a lot of hip-hop here, but Ice-T has always been the one I most respect. When he wasn't doing his over-the-top act, he wrote a lot of songs urging young men to take their brains and their honor as seriously as their physicality. Not that he was opposed to violence, to be sure; but neither am I.

Here are a few of them.







Looks like he hasn't changed much.

Wow, So... That Bill O'Reilly Doesn't Know $#~! About Firearms, Does He?

Some of you sent me this.



"Howitzers"? Like, the Civil War ones that require a team of guys to operate? Yeah, you can buy those. Not these, though; and they still require a team to operate.

"Heavy weapons"? Most of what he lists has been banned without severe Federal intrusion into your life since the 1930s.

Apparently nobody ever explained to him about the difference between semi- and fully-automatic, either.

And as for owning 60,000 rounds... OK, you can buy them. How many can you carry?

On "Anglo-Saxon" Relations

Did you know that "Romney" was an Anglo-Saxon name? This article asserts that it is, based on an Anglo-Saxon place name that predates the Norman conquest. Given the structure of the name, and the time I've spent with Old English/Anglo-Saxon, I find that surprising. On reflection, though, it's not impossible.

This interesting surname is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is lcoational from a place so called in Kent, which was originally the name of a river. The first element seems to be derived from the Old English pre 7th Century "rum", spacious, but its formation and meaning are obscure. The second element is derived from the Old English "ea", river. The placename was first recorded as "Rumenea" in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of Essex in 1052. A derivative of Romney is found recorded as "Ruminingseta" in the Saxon Charters of 697, and means "the fold of the Romney people".... The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Robert de Romenel, which was dated 1086, The Domesday Book of Kent, during the reign of King William 1, "The Conqueror", 1066 - 1087.

The spelling "Robert de Romenel" is clearly French on two points: "Robert" is an Old French name that existed among the Normans, but not among the Saxons; and "de -" is a French form as well. "Romney" also looks like a word of French descent.

But the authors of the book thought and wrote in French, and there were variations of "Robert" that was native to Anglo-Saxon England: Hrēodbēorð and some others. If the name was Normanized at the time of the Conquest, it could have survived in a form that doesn't look Saxon, but honestly happens to be. So possibly, for whatever it's worth, he's as Saxon as King Alfred.

Of course, for those Americans who aren't antiquarians, the real question is: "Was this remark just coded racism, or was it double-super coded racism?"

The Burning

Remember we talked about that paper by that professor out in Texas that purported to find worse outcomes for the children of adults in same-sex relationships than for those in intact marriages? We talked about it here.

Apparently that professor has received a certain amount of attention from his colleagues.

His data were collected by a survey firm that conducts top studies, such as the American National Election Survey, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. His sample was a clear improvement over those used by most previous studies on this topic.

Regnerus was trained in one of the best graduate programs in the country and was a postdoctoral fellow under an internationally renowned scholar of family, Glen Elder, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.... His article underwent peer review, and the journal's editor stands behind it.... And another recent study relying on a nationally representative sample also suggests that children of same-sex parents differ from children from intact, heterosexual marriages.

But never mind that. None of it matters.... His antagonists have already damaged his chances of being promoted to full professor. If his critics are successful at besmirching his reputation, his career may be seriously damaged.

But something bigger is at stake: The very integrity of the social-science research process is threatened by the public smearing and vigilante media attacks we have seen in this case.

Well, that will teach you to say something interesting. Back to the factory with you!

Government by Blackmail

Apparently this kind of thing works in New York City.

Last night New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an extraordinarily dangerous and radical pronouncement....

Well, I would take it one step further. I don't understand why the police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say, we're going to go on strike. We're not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what's required to keep us safe.

After all, police officers want to go home to their families. And we're doing everything we can to make their job more difficult but, more importantly, more dangerous, by leaving guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, and letting people who have those guns buy things like armor-piercing bullets.

Out here, I'd expect the public to respond to a 'police strike' by saying, "Look, if you don't want the job, don't let the door hit you on your way out." I don't see a deputy out here more than once a year or so anyway; I wouldn't even notice if they went away. Maybe even save some money come tax time.

The mayor apparently realized that he was advocating an illegal action, and is trying to walk it back today. I wonder, though, if it wouldn't be a real awakening for the public sector union to take a walk? People might just find that they don't need as much help from the government as they think they do. Even in New York City, I'll bet there are many neighborhoods that could pull together and suppress any criminals who thought it was a good time to take advantage. They certainly might find that they'd like to be able to apply at-will employment principles to these jobs, rather than being subject to unionized blackmail.

In Chicago, crime rates might even go down. Whatever the police unions are doing out there obviously isn't working. Maybe it's time for a change of pace.

The British Resistance

The Olympic games are in London this year. As those of you who were in Atlanta in 1996 will recall, or who were any other city where this plague of locusts has descended, with the Olympics comes aggressive enforcement of Olympic copyrights. Things you could say six weeks ago -- "Welcome to Atlanta, Home of the 1996 Olympics" -- suddenly become a civil offense for which you will be hauled into court. Actually, it's worse than that: even "Atlanta" or "1996!" becomes off limits for the duration.

Technically the law is on their side here, as they want to restrict their logo and name to their sponsors, in the hope of encouraging more sponsors. Of course, most people who fall afoul of the aggressive enforcement just wanted to get into the spirit of the thing, and are shocked when they are told they have to pay big bucks to join in celebrating the games. The games are, after all, famously proclaimed to be all about international goodwill. Though the Games are in the right by the lights of the law, they often end up trampling on that spirit.

A few street merchants aside, the citizens of Atlanta mostly just ponied up the dough and put up with it. The British were apparently more irritated. Londoners, for example, have taken to finding new ways to torment the enforcers.

"These aren't rings! They're squares!"

The law is an ass

And never more so than in Wondertaxland!  Prof. Althouse regales us with the fable of a rich woman who leaves a prominent work of art to her heirs.  The problem is, the work of art features a long-dead stuffed endangered species, which therefore cannot be sold legally.  How to extract estate taxes from this bonanza?  (The woman died in 2007, before the estate taxes were temporarily de-fanged.)  If the estate can't sell the art, is it worth anything?  Absent the endangered species law, art experts say it would be worth $65 million, thus generating almost $30 million in tax bills.  Assuming the estate doesn't have that kind of cash handy without selling the artwork, it's a tough spot.

The problem of valuing an asset that can't be sold isn't really as exotic as this story would suggest.  It's the typical problem faced by a family business at death, and the reason it's a very good idea to have a big life-insurance policy available to pay the estate tax with if you don't want your heirs to be dragooned into a fire-sale.  For decades I watched people spends untold millions of dollars fighting over the valuation of businesses that couldn't or wouldn't be sold for one reason or another; the usual approach in bankruptcy court is to hire experts to fight over what kind of income it's likely to generate over time, and then over the right discount rate to use in taking a present value of that stream of income.  (Bankruptcy lawyers can keep that kind of thing up for years, if a sensible judge doesn't exert some discipline over what can never be more than a rough substitute for reality.)

The best approach is to imitate Solomon:  try to find a way to force all the combatants to take responsibility for the flip side of their claims.  The IRS should be forced, for instance, to confront the prospect of a charitable deduction from ordinary income resulting from the donation of the artwork to a museum.  That will put a stop to wild imaginings about the huge value of the piece.  Likewise, if the heirs insist that the work has no value, they should be forced to confront the price they would demand in an eminent-domain action.  Even if they can't sell it, they may be very attached to the notion of keeping it, whether for personal pleasure or for the status of owning it.  If a museum owned it, it might generate income from admissions fees.  Regardless of the popular wisdom, sales are not the only means of establishing a value even in the strict economic sense.  The old system of dividing a candy-bar fairly comes to mind:  one cuts, the other chooses.

Better yet, though, just get rid of the unified gift-and-estate tax, which is an abomination to start with.

Is Patriotism Moral?

A professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, Dr. Gary Gutting, asks the question. It's an interesting approach to the liberal/modern problem set, which tends to argue to the conclusion that patriotism isn't moral. Dr. Gutting wants to argue that American patriotism, at least, can be; but he also wants you to understand why many modern thinkers don't think it can be ("modern," in philosophy, generally refers to the lines of thought originating in the 18th century with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, which underlie most of contemporary philosophy as well).

At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. That was the answer among the ancient Greeks as well as many other traditional societies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders.

Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism, thus beginning a centuries-long argument that, by modern times, led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals. In other words, the “in-group” for morality is not any particular social group (family, city, nation) but humankind as a whole. This universal moral viewpoint seems to reject patriotism for “cosmopolitanism[.]”

The argument follows two questions:

1)  How can it be a virtue, if it causes us to value some people's interests more highly than others?

2)  Is it possible to treat people as equals while favoring your own group's interest?

I'll leave you to consider his approach to American patriotism. I'm going to propose another set of answers to the problem, which to me seem better.

Dr. Gutting should pause and reflect on how Aristotle, as well as Plato, would approach the question.  First of all, what is a virtue?  It is a strength, an excellence; it is also a capacity, which allows you to pursue new actualities.  Courage is a strength, but having courage means being able to do things that the cowardly cannot do.

But to determine what capacities are really conveyed by the virtue, we also have to know the nature of the thing. Human nature is different from horse nature. The expression of the virtue of courage in a man will therefore be very different from the expression of what is courage in a horse.

Patriotism is a subset of the virtue of loyalty. Loyalty is certainly a virtue, because it gives us strength: those who possess mutual loyalty have a capacity to do things that those without it cannot do.

But what is the proper expression of loyalty? To know that we have to look to the nature of the thing that is being loyal, in this case, human nature.

Aristotle determines (in Politics I) that man is a social animal, and that political behavior is part of human nature. Every man will thus be born into a polity as he is born into a family; for every woman, it is the same.

It turns out that patriotism is a virtue that arises from our nature. It's like your relationship with your mother: you're going to have a relationship of one kind or another, but if you can find a way to love her and forgive her, it's a healthier relationship than if you get trapped in despising and resenting her. Thus, patriotism is a kind of human flourishing; everyone should be patriotic.

But what about the concern that we need to treat everyone as equals? Dr. Gutting is thinking about the American mission to free all mankind, which I also think is an admirable mission. There is, though, another answer: we often seek justice adversarially.

Our court system works this way. The idea isn't that it's wrong for the defense attorney to be totally committed, by hook or crook, to getting his client as free of charges as possible. It's that, in the opposition of such interests, justice will emerge. So there's no reason not to fight for your country; in fact, insofar as you are interested in that higher justice, everyone should fight for his country, and justice will emerge from the contest. The better ideas and systems will rise; the worse ones will fall, or reform.

Thus, if your interest is justice for all humankind, this may be the best way to achieve it.

Chivalry in Action

Here is an interesting fact: out of those killed in the recent mass shooting, fully a third were men who had thrown themselves on top of their girlfriends to protect them. Two of these were US Navy sailors.

Another man was shot doing the same thing, but did not die. All of these men have the honor of the Hall, and deserve both our praise and acclaim. They chose a most honorable path.

A Word with Zell Miller

Professor Zell Miller, former Senator, Governor and Lieutenant Governor of the Great State of Georgia, and a former Marine as well, consented to a brief interview at a recent fundraiser for a Republican.  Zell credits the United States Marine Corps with his success in life. He had allowed himself to be made to feel inferior by those at his college who mocked his mountain upbringing, so that he had dropped out.  Depressed, drinking moonshine, he drove his truck into a ditch and was picked up by the police.  He joined the Marines looking to be straightened out.  He learned discipline, honor, punctuality, and the other tools that let him ascend to the highest office in the state, and to be the natural choice to replace a Senator who died in office.

He endorsed President Bush in a firestorm speech at the Republican National Convention, but refused to leave the Democratic Party.  It had been his home his whole life, he said.

Why would the most famous lifelong Democrat in Georgia break a long exile to help fundraise for a Republican?

“My grandmother was a Collins out of Union County. And I was impressed by what a good legislator [Doug Collins] made. “I felt I had a mountain relationship with him.”

The interviewer spends most of his time on Zell's health concerns and the terrible pain that resulted from a recent fall down a flight of stairs. He gets to something important late in the interview, though, which is to ask him why he had turned to the right so publicly back in 2004.  He had become not only a Bush supporter, but an outspoken foe of abortion, and an equally outspoken critic of the dissolution of American morality.

Why?

“I had a conversion. I had a late life conversion. I changed my views on several things. This had to do with my son going blind, and me having to carry him to the doctor with his hand on my shoulder.... I prayed and prayed that they could do something about his sight,” Miller said.

The prayers seemed to work. “He can see pretty good out of one eye right now.” But a bargain struck with God often transforms the petitioner more than the object of any plea. “I changed on a lot of things. Not just abortion, but my whole life in general. I was a pretty rough character in my younger days. I needed to change,” Miller said.

I suppose even the Marine Corps won't object to hearing that God had to finish what they started.

A Conceptual Point About the Division of Rights

We are all familiar with the division of liberties and rights into "negative" and "positive."  A negative right is the kind of right that doesn't require anyone to provide you with anything; it just forbids them from interfering with you.  A positive right requires some actual provision.  In Georgia as in several other states, for example, there is a positive right in the state constitution to hunt and to fish.  This means that the state is obligated to provide the means for such hunting and fishing.  It cannot be the case that you have a positive right to hunt, but that there is no land available on which you may exercise this right.  If you have a positive right to fish, you must have access to at least some waters in which fishing is possible.

These rights aren't unfettered -- there are licensing requirements, fees, bag limits, and so forth -- but they do require that the state provide something for you.  Your right imposes an obligation on the state not merely to refrain, but to act on your behalf to secure the thing to which you have a right.

All that is well understood.  However, what is less well understood is that there is a middle ground between the two categories.  There are some otherwise-negative rights that require physical goods.  No one is obligated to provide you with these goods, but your right to provide yourself with them is protected.  Thus, the Second Amendment says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Nobody needs to provide you with arms, but you must not be stopped from purchasing your own if you desire.

But it's a little stronger than that.  There is an almost-positive element to it:  we are obligated not to try to make the arms unavailable.  It won't do to set up a case in which anyone who wishes to buy a firearm can buy one, but there are none to buy.  It won't do for a governor to say, "I'm not infringing your right; go buy a gun, any gun you can find!" if that governor has previously arranged to buy up all the guns and melt them down.

In such a case the negative right has ceased to exist even though it is allegedly still extant and uninfringed by any letter of law.  There isn't a positive right as such, but there almost is:  the government may not be legally obligated to provide the good, or even access to the good.  Yet if it isn't obligated not to prevent the possibility of access to the good, the right can cease to exist as an actual right that you can really exercise.

A similar case occurs with these "Free Speech zones," whereby the government orders you not to engage in assembly or speech near a political convention (say), except in a narrow area too small for all the competing groups (and usually far from the actual event).  You have a negative right that is technically not being infringed; and technically, there is even a place provided for its exercise.  But practically, the right is denied if there is not a place in which to practice it.

So yesterday I wrote up a piece about Commerce, Georgia, and the public pool that does not permit cursing.  Is that an unacceptable infringement of freedom of speech, for the government officials who run the pool to refuse to allow you to speak certain words in a public park?  Perhaps not, if you think that the existence of the rest of the world is an adequate amount of space for cursing in; in that case, you could say that this is better, because we have one place for people who don't like to hear foul language (and do like to swim), and people who like to curse can go do it elsewhere when they are done swimming; or they can simply forgo swimming, and curse all day if it pleases them.

How far can we take that principle?  Can we ban cursing on all public property?  Within the city limits, whether the land is public or private?  Within the county?  Within a state?  Within the United States?  At some point we're crossing that line pertaining to the mostly-negative right that has a necessary physical component.  Just where?

A Place Called Commerce

I happened to ride through Commerce, Georgia today. It's a simple town, with a main street full of law firms and banks or credit agencies, antique shops and little shops for women, a couple of small restaurants -- including a pretty good pizza joint with pool tables and draft PBR -- and an active railroad track running right through the center of town. At one end of town is the Confederate memorial, kept up by the Daughters of the Confederacy and featuring an old-style Georgia flag.

At the other end of town is Veterans' Park, which is where the pool happens to be. The pool is open to the public for a small fee during the height of summer, Wednesday through Saturday from one to five.

If you go to the pool, though, leave your bad language behind. Signs proclaim in very tall letters that there will be absolutely no foul language at the pool, with violators ordered to leave at once.

The rule seems to have sparked little rebellion. Lifeguards refer to their elders as "Sir" or "Ma'am," as young Southerners are supposed to do. Teenagers at the pool are mannerly and obedient to it, though their tattoos suggest that they are otherwise embroiled in the culture that they see on television.

It's a nice little town. Too far from the mountains for me, but a pleasant enough place to pass through on a Saturday in the summertime.

Prices

This is courage, if you like.  A South Korean man soaks up Marxist fantasies to the point that he defects to North Korea with his wife and children, expecting free health care and a nice government job.  Right away he and his family are put into a brutal camp and told that his job will be to tour Europe and entice other families to the same fate.  He explains to his wife that he may have to do it in order to preserve their new life.  She slaps him in the face, saying "they would have to pay the price for his mistakes – he could not entrap others."

He goes to Copenhagen and defects, intending to spend the rest of his life telling the horrible, cautionary tale. His wife and children disappear into a camp to starve and die.

And in her place, what would we have done?

Elizabeth Warren Annoys Us for the Wrong Reasons

Via HotAir, an excellent summary of what regulations might help in the financial market, vs. what regulations actually will be pushed by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Congress should require federal agencies dealing with mortgages to put into place a minimum down-payment rule.  Existing regulators and law enforcement agencies could do better at policing deception and fraud—and show that they’re willing to shut down repeat offenders, even big ones.  And lawmakers should start phasing out Fannie and Freddie, so that government dominance no longer distorts the housing market.

Instead, the focus of CFPB enthusiasts, notably including Elizabeth Warren, is the kind of jam that 10% of consumers can get into when they demonstrate why the bottom 10% of consumers shouldn't be trusted within 100 feet of a financial instrument without a court-appointed guardian (leaving the rest of us alone, thanks very much).  New York economic-justice advocate Sarah Ludwig uses a middle-aged government worker as an object lesson.  Finding herself short of cash one month, she resorted to a payday lender, which lent her money a sky-high rates in exchange for a post-dated check on the strength of a pay stub proving she was employed.  Each month she could either pay the loan back or extend it.  Eventually, if she failed to do either, the payday lender would present the check at her bank.  Now, this was a deliberately kited check; there were no funds to pay it.  So she started incurring bounced-check charges and ended up with bad credit.   Is the solution for this once-burned consumer to work through the bad credit and repair her reputation?  Or is it greater federal government involvement in consumer protection and education?  It's hard to imagine that lack of education led this middle-aged government worker to close her eyes to the consequences of kiting a check.

Another poster child:

Andrew Giordano’s bank mistakenly gave him a replacement debit card that offered overdraft protection, and he failed to realize it.  He proceeded to overdraw the account multiple times, enough to result in $814 in fees.  “Funds obviously were not there,” his wife says plaintively.  “Why would [the bank] continue to accept the charges?”  Warren neglects to respond with the obvious question:  Why did Giordano have no idea how much money was in his account?

I had a little more sympathy for the woman who "became a victim when she racked up long-term debt on a variable-rate credit card and then professed shock when her card issuer exercised its right to raise the rate."  But Congress already passed a bill in 2009, with bipartisan support, requiring credit-card issuers to warn customers of an impending rate increase and to continue to apply the old rate to existing balances.  What's left for the CFPB to do?  Well, for one thing, a rule

that requires home buyers to pay a minimum-percentage down payment would be a simple, effective option.  People who have been able to save, say, 10 percent of a house’s value demonstrate financial discipline.   Further, a family that has equity in a house can refinance easily to get out of a bad mortgage; such a family also has the flexibility to move, if a breadwinner has the opportunity to take a better job in another city or state.  And creating a minimum down-payment rule would be fast and easy—a major benefit, since continued uncertainty about financial rules is contributing to banks’ reluctance to lend and thus to today’s sluggish economy. 

Yet the CFPB almost surely won’t take such an obvious step, and again, the fault lies with Congress.  The Dodd-Frank bill didn’t specify a down-payment rule because such a rule would push house prices down further—anathema to Congress.   Moreover, a down-payment requirement would run afoul not only of America’s debt-carrying middle class but of the affordable-housing and minority-group advocates who want poorer Americans to enjoy the same dream of indebtedness that the middle class enjoys.  As Orson Aguilar, executive director of the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, puts it, any mortgage rules that would require homeowners to have a good job, good credit, and a hefty down payment are “problematic.”

The author concludes: "the CFPB is likely to encourage poorer people to take on debt that they cannot afford."

The bureau can do so because Congress gave it the responsibility to enforce some “fair-lending” laws.  As Congress put it, the CFPB must study “access to fair and affordable credit for traditionally underserved communities” and ensure “nondiscriminatory access to credit for both individuals and communities.”  The probable result will be to strong-arm the financial industry to lend money cheaply to the poor—and when something is cheap, people buy more of it, even if they shouldn’t. 

The CFPB is already moving aggressively on this front.  . . .  In April, the CFPB’s deputy director, Raj Date, told consumer advocates at a Greenlining conference that the bureau would work assiduously to make sure that “lenders are not creating conditions that make loans more expensive, or access more difficult, for certain populations."

An Analysis of the Mass Shooting Problem

It's a little surprising when a mass shooting gets a lot of attention these days; we've seen so many of them over the years that they usually have to contain some especially shocking element (like last year's famous one, almost exactly a year ago). People often seem to think about these things as a sort-of disease.

For a long time we tried to understand how the disease was spread -- was it by violent video games? Movies? -- but that kind of efficient cause proves elusive, and for good reason. There is no such cause. The actual cause is not the efficient cause but the choice of the individual killer. They are doing these things for reasons of their own.

In spite of what we hear from determinists, humans are not pinball machines. We don't do X because we experienced Y; rather, we ourselves determine what experience Y means. We do that according to our beliefs, attitudes and upbringing, informed by far from determined by our physical makeup. The determination of meaning, and the decision of what to do about the meaning we find in the world, is a spontaneous process in the sense that it arises at least as much from our concepts as our biology.

Since concepts are invisible, we cannot prevent the free choice of evil. We can sometimes predict it, but often we cannot.

So: a certain number of people are going to decide to become killers. What to do about it?

One idea we often hear is that we should restrict access to firearms. There are reasons not to do this arising from the broader nature of human life, and the free citizen's relationship to the state. However, there are also reasons not to do it within the context of the problem. The first one is obvious: an armed citizenry can sometimes stop these attacks, whereas a disarmed citizenry is much more vulnerable.

Carrying a gun is kind of a pain, really, and the odds that something like this shooting will come up are small enough that most people may not think it's worth the hassle. However, a former Marine who happened to take his pistol to the movies that night could have stopped the attack earlier. This is in fact the best defense to an attack in progress, since it is an unpredictable factor from the point of view of the killer. He can avoid the police, but he can't be sure about the concealed weapons in the audience.

There's a second reason that is less obvious. The kind of mind that chooses this path is capable of worse. Even Timothy McVeigh, far from the smartest man in the world, could concoct a huge bomb. This fellow appears to have been brilliant: there's no limit to what kind of harm he could have created if he had chosen that route.

This is to say that the easy availability of firearms, and the glamour they are endowed with culturally, acts as a kind of brake on the harm done by mass killers. Firearms are less deadly than bombs, they take longer to do their work, and you have to be right there operating them in person. That exposes you to being stopped mid-act by armed citizens, and potentially even to the police arriving (although that is unlikely, since 'longer than a bomb' is still only 'a few minutes' rather than 'instantly'). You are available to be stopped before the harm is completed. You're easier to catch afterwards. Finally, a single person with a firearm can only kill so many people because of weight limits on how much ammunition he can carry.

For all these reasons, the best response is to encourage the carrying of arms by citizens, and to continue to glorify the gun. The last thing we want is for the evil among us to innovate.

In Praise of Sprawl?

What if a major reason for the income inequality that concerns many on the Left was anti-Sprawl aesthetics?

Economists have long taught this history to their undergraduates as an illustration of the growth theory for which Robert Solow won his Nobel Prize in economics: Poor places are short on the capital that would make local labor more productive. Investors move capital to those poor places, hoping to capture some of the increased productivity as higher returns. Productivity gradually equalizes across the country, and wages follow. When capital can move freely, the poorer a place is to start with, the faster it grows.... Or at least it used to....

In a new working paper, Shoag and Peter Ganong, a doctoral student in economics at Harvard, offer an explanation: The key to convergence was never just mobile capital. It was also mobile labor. But the promise of a better life that once drew people of all backgrounds to rich places such as New York and California now applies only to an educated elite -- because rich places have made housing prohibitively expensive....

[T]here are two competing models of successful American cities. One encourages a growing population, fosters a middle-class, family-centered lifestyle, and liberally permits new housing. It used to be the norm nationally, and it still predominates in the South and Southwest. The other favors long-term residents, attracts highly productive, work-driven people, focuses on aesthetic amenities, and makes it difficult to build. It prevails on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in picturesque cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first model spurs income convergence, the second spurs economic segregation.

So, to fight inequality, encourage sprawl. Or, if you hate sprawling cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, accept that you're the problem when it comes to creating inequality. You're making it too expensive for the working man to come live and work where you do. That means he'll live in Atlanta, where he will make a bit less money, but he can afford to live better on it. Which, in turn, means you might rethink what "inequality" means. If I could earn $5,000 a month here, or in New York City, or in China, there's a significant "inequality" even at the same rate of pay. After expenses I'd be scraping by in New York, doing quite well here, and rolling in dough in China once I converted my pay into Renminbi.

Addendum: Hank III & The Edge

My series on country music is over, but I wanted to provide a response to a comment.  Raven expressed an opinion that modern, pop country music seems to have lost the Outlaw edge.  That's true.  It has.

But there are some out there who are pushing the edge still, and one of them is Hank Williams Sr.'s grandson.  If you look into his music far enough, you'll find a lot you don't like.  He's part of a country band, a punk rock band, a metal band, and pushes out without regard to what people will be ready to accept.  So, you know, be warned.

Here's a couple of easier to digest things to get you started.





Here's him doing a couple of Outlaw classics.





...and some less easy things, which some of you will not like, and some of you will like even better.



This next one is NSFW at all... but for the record, he doesn't like pop country either.



And then there's this one, featuring a "hellbilly" sound.



So if you're interested in edge, it's out there.  He's far from the only one; if you liked the more radical pieces, you might also try the Pine Box Boys and see where that leads you.  They have less range, but they're very good within their range, and are linked to a lot of other bands who are looking for the edge.

If you didn't like Hank Williams, stay far away from those guys.

The Attack Dogs Eat At Waffle House

I had much the same sentiment when I saw this list.  Naturally, the presumptive explanation is that these organizations are, well, you know.  I mean, "Dixie" cups and "White" Castle burgers, well, how loud does a dog whistle have to be?

But I have to admit, I was a little surprised to learn this guy was among them.

The safety net

From the American Enterprise Institute, an essay speaking exactly to what's been troubling me lately about the argument that we have to submit to mandatory entitlement programs because capitalism is too risky:

What used to be called "public charity" is now "entitlement programs."  The difference is much more than semantics.  The word "charity" carries with it the implication that the intended beneficiary is someone else.  Those who paid taxes to support such programs, approvingly or not, did so in the clear understanding that they were paying to help other people; they neither expected nor desired any personal benefit from the programs.  . . .

Gradually, however, the left inculcated the notion that we are all at risk, due to the nature of "capitalism" (i.e., freedom), and hence that government programs for those in need ought to be seen as a universal necessity.  In other words, such programs were no longer to be viewed as something the vast majority of citizens provide for the benefit of the very few, but rather as something government ought to be providing for each of us as a primary function.

As I read somewhere else today, the safety net is supposed to be a trampoline for the very few, not social flypaper for the many.  I've been arguing with Grim recently about the conflation of insurance with subsidies.  The distinction is critical:  Insurance is appropriate for most adults, but subsidies are not.  If the category of "needy citizens" expands to include a large fraction of Americans, or even (as is now becoming the norm) a majority of Americans, the category has lost its meaning and programs that address it have lost their justification for existence.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Taxing Internet Sales

Dr. Mercury at Maggie's Farm has been discussing the current proposals to tax Internet sales nationwide.  Some states are already doing it; my own beloved Texas has bullied Amazon into assessing sales tax, effective this month.  One of the ostensible rationales is the need to "level the playing field" for brick-and-mortar stores (as if anyone believed the motive was anything but the obvious desire to glom onto more revenue), but as Dr. M and many commenters pointed out, the local stores are going to need a lot more than an 8% advantage to complete with the on-line prices and selection.

Here at Swankienda99, we rely heavily on Amazon for things we can't get locally.  Ever since Amazon expanded out of books and took on the entire retail market, I've depended on them for the many food brands my duopolistic grocery store won't carry.  They're an especially good source for brands that have fallen out of disfavor but haven't completely ceased production.  In fact, I buy most things from Amazon that I don't need to touch or handle ahead of time, from cookware to linens to small appliances.  They let me search efficiently for products by key word and best price, they provide customer reviews that take the place of indifferent sales clerks, and they get me my stuff in two days for a flat annual fee.  It just has to be a product that can be easily shipped, so it can't be too heavy, too voluminous, or too perishable.

In order to compete, local stores may have to specialize in that kind of tricky freight, or provide expertise and advice that can't be duplicated by my fellow customers on-line, or carry things for which I'll pay a premium for same-day availability.  Big-box stores have gotten used to being passive purveyors who make their customers wander through miles of aisles on scavenger hunts.  I wonder if future retail merchants won't have to function a bit more like knowledgeable brokers in order to lure customers back.

What do you guys buy online?

They never learn

James O'Keefe always uses the same trick to get people to admit what they're doing.  He pretends to be a guy with a scam to bilk money out of the taxpayers, and he runs it by an organization he suspects is aiding and abetting similar scams.  He gets them talking and joshing with him.  He repeats, in increasingly outrageous terms, exactly what kind of scam he's running and how it works like a charm.  They laugh and agree that, yes, it works just like that, and they're totally cool with it.  Hey, the money's sitting right there, who wouldn't pick it up?  Ah?  Ah?  Usually they give him a little friendly advice about magic words to use in packaging the scam.  Then he releases the video and waits for them to complain that they were taken out of context.



In his wake he probably leaves a trail of emergency meetings designed to prevent anyone from each organization from spilling the beans to any more strangers who might be carrying cameras.  But he keeps moving from industry to industry, so they never see him coming.  And he doesn't seem to be running out of targets.

Act One, Scene One

The Post Office defaults on nearly eleven billion dollars in benefit payments for 'future retirees.'  That's not a state or a city; that's the US Federal Government.

So, what does that mean for the 'future retiree,' i.e., the current worker?  Does he or she have those retirement benefits or not?  Not, I would think, at least not to the same degree.

The Post Office is the least important of services, and so merely the first to arrive at where all are heading.  Soon it will be veterans' benefits and pensions, or the benefits and pensions of other federal agencies; then it will be Medicaid, or Medicare.  The question in front of us is mostly, I think, "How soon can we accept that this is the end of everything we've believed in and fought for, and start thinking about what comes after?"

We've come to the denial stage in our grief over the death of America.  Can it still be saved?  So much, we want to believe that it can be.  We've given so much.  I once watched rockets come in over Camp Victory, and saw them burst under the Phalanx guns.  'The rockets' red glare; the bombs bursting in air!' I thought at the time.  'Now I've seen it:  now I understand.'

Maybe half of one percent of us saw something like that in Iraq or Afghanistan.  I am speaking to Cassandra's point -- second link, above.  What matters most to what most people believe is where their interests are vested.  There are too many vested interests against reform on the scale necessary for America to survive.

Look out for them petards

It looks like bad things can happen when you jam an unpopular law through Congress using a tricky parliamentary procedure.  For one thing, some of the usual inconsistencies that might have gotten worked out in conference in a smaller bill are set in stone when the conference process has to be avoided like the plague and, in any case, the bill is thousands of pages long and full of the inconsistencies that inevitably result from brutal last-minute horse-trading.   In the case of ObamaCare, Congress managed to pass a bill that provides for consumer subsidies and employer penalties for states that set up the required insurance exchanges, but does not authorize either consumer subsidies or employer penalties if the states opt out and the federal government establishes the exchanges on their behalf.

Nor was this a scrivener's error, as the IRS now claims.  It was a conscious choice to increase the pressure on states to set up exchanges.  Apparently everyone calculated that, as the Cato Institute put it, the bill would reach state capitals to be greeted as a liberator.  As things stand, however, there is real doubt whether the IRS has the power either to issue subsidies in the form of tax credits or to impose penalties on non-conforming employers in the states that say "Thanks, but no thanks."  To date, eight states have politely declined, while many more are stalling.

The Cato paper provides a helpful summary for those of us who have forgotten just how contorted the parliamentary shenanigans got:

Congressional Democrats had intended to empanel a conference committee that would merge the PPACA with the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R. 3962) that had passed the House of Representatives.  Had this occurred, the PPACA might look quite different than it does today.  But in January 2010, Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).  Brown’s victory shifted the political terrain.  It gave Senate Republicans the 41st vote necessary to filibuster a conference report on the House and Senate bills. 

As a result, House and Senate Democrats abandoned a conference committee in favor of a novel strategy.  House Democrats agreed to pass the PPACA exactly as it had passed the Senate, but only upon receiving assurances that after the House amended the PPACA through the “budget reconciliation” process, the Senate would immediately approve those amendments.  Since Senate rules protect reconciliation bills from a filibuster, the PPACA’s supporters needed only 51 votes to pass the House’s “reconciliation” amendments.  The downside of this strategy was that the rules governing budget reconciliation limited the amendments House Democrats could make.  Supporters opted for an imperfect bill – that is, a bill that did not accomplish all they may have set out to do, but for which they had the votes – over no bill at all. 

The Act signed into law by President Obama and the law that the IRS rule purports to implement — the PPACA — is a hybrid of the two Senate-committee-reported bills, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA).  This history, and the need to resort to the reconciliation process to pass the final law, helps explain why the final legislation looks as it does, and why the Act does not conform with the hopes or expectations of some of its supporters.

Normally, if a bill contains a technical glitch, Congress can just fix it . . . . Oh, wait, they don't have the votes any more, do they?

Love and welfare

Building

It's fun watching a meme take root.  This week, President Obama put his finger on the sore point that divides individualists from collectivists when he made a speech that has been paraphrased as "You didn't build that -- somebody else built it for you."  By now you've all seen a number of posters showing Mr. Obama cheerfully explaining the concept to the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs.  I enjoy watching the Net play with the theme:

Outlaw Country: A Final Word

Now that I've spoken to the things that seem to me to really matter, I want to just give the singers a chance to relax and have some fun. It wasn't all about a serious movement. Some of it, at least, was about the joy they found in life.

 





















They weren't just Outlaws.  They were merry men.  Maybe that makes a difference.  Maybe it makes all the difference.

Ya'll know the words to "Rocky Top," right?

Encyclopedia Brown

When I was in the second grade, our teacher offered us special credit if we could learn to spell "encyclopedia."  We all did:  e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a, or -p-e-a-d-i-a.  I think at this point the old form is no longer taught even as an option.

One of my favorite series of books as a boy were the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries.  I read that the author died today, at the age of 85.  The neat thing about them, for an aspiring boy detective, was that they presented all the facts but none of the solutions.  The solutions were collected in a separate section in the back, for you to check once you had sorted out what you thought the proper answer might be.

In this the author -- his name was Donald Sobol -- answered the complaint raised by no less than Raymond Chandler in his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder."

 The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffles the lazy reader, who won’t be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

Donald Sobol didn't do that:  he gave you the cute answer, but he assumed you would figure out the missing piece.  Learning to do that was the point of reading his stories; it is why they are still worth reading, for boys of a certain disposition.

But if I am going to quote from the Chandler essay, I ought to quote the parts everyone ought to know.  Here they are.

[Hammett] wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street...

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

If you have that, you have enough to write a good mystery; you may even have a great deal more.

Socialize the Loss

Bloomberg is looking more at the Bain Capital issue.

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

Oh nonsense, man! Nothing could be more relevant to overseeing the U.S. economy.

Imagine that the country was a corporation, and its shareholders were those entities rich or powerful enough to arrange major campaign contributions.  The workers are those who, well, aren't that rich.  What happens when we suffer severe losses as a corporation?  We socialize the losses.

When things go well, why that's private profit!

I'm surprised you don't get this.  The President's out campaigning on the very point this afternoon.  How many times does he have to explain how economic management works?

Changing diapers prevents Alzheimer's

. . . Or, what can happen when popular science writers get hold of almost any story about non-human biology.  It seems that bees stay vigorous as long as they're tending larvae in the hive, but slide into decrepitude quickly after assuming their mature function of foraging.  When researchers removed the young larvae caretakers, some of the older bees were forced to give up foraging and tend the larvae themselves.  A protective protein in the brain slowed the decrepitude that afflicted their foraging colleagues.  The irrepressible authors cannot restrain themselves from noting:

They found Prx6, a protein also found in humans that can help protect against dementia – including diseases such as Alzheimer’s – and they discovered a second and documented “chaperone” protein that protects other proteins from being damaged when brain or other tissues are exposed to cell-level stress. 

In general, researchers are interested in creating a drug that could help people maintain brain function, yet they may be facing up to 30 years of basic research and trials. 

“Maybe social interventions – changing how you deal with your surroundings – is something we can do today to help our brains stay younger,” said Amdam.  “Since the proteins being researched in people are the same proteins bees have, these proteins may be able to spontaneously respond to specific social experiences.”

France to California: This Means War

Animal-rights activists in California attempted to block not only the in-state production of foie gras but also its importation.  The French, never willing to take an act of aggression lying down, responded with a call to boycott California wine.

An interesting side note:  California Republicans argue that, while the state can do almost any fool thing it wants within the state, the Interstate Commerce Clause forbids it to regulate what happens outside its borders.  It falls to the federal government to make mistakes in that arena.

Love that Thomas Sowell

He's a potent anti-Orwellian force:

Let us begin with the word "spend."  Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can?  Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama. 

Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called spending but "investment."  You can say anything if you have your own private language.

An Insight into Information Warfare

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post suggests a model for thinking about the negative advertising campaigns of the Presidential election that is straight out of US Army doctrine.

The extent of [the Obama campaign's] effort is only now becoming clear. The Associated Press reports: “President Barack Obama’s campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.” Think of it like the Confederacy’s artillery barrage on the third day of Gettysburg before Pickett’s charge — you have to in essence disable the other side before the charge begins or its curtains.

This is exactly how the US Army thinks of what it currently calls "information operations."  It considers them a kind of strategic effect, a "shaping" effort almost precisely analogous to artillery.  You can use a heavy information barrage to deny terrain (as for example by blanketing a neighborhood with wanted posters with a picture and a large reward:  you might not catch the guy, but he'll have to feel very shaky about trying to pass through the neighborhood).  You can use it to demoralize.  You can use it to disrupt the cohesion of an enemy unit.

It's sort of surprising to see someone like Rubin get that concept so well.  It's also surprising to see the Obama campaign's efforts likened to a Confederate barrage.

"Always go right at 'em"

Photon Courier on why Admiral Nelson could beat the tar out of his opponents, and on the disquieting trend in the U.S. to follow rules and regulations rather than do what makes sense.   He quotes a 1797 Spanish naval official about why he always got his butt kicked:

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support. . . .  Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres.

Following the links at Photon Courier takes us to this 2005 article at WaPo bemoaning the lack of "insurbordination and freelancing" witnessed in the stumbling aftermath of Katrina:   "Everyone coloring inside the lines -- it's a great system until the wind starts blowing really, really hard."

Outlaw Country, Part 4: Raven's Requests

Raven asked toward the beginning of this series for some "libertarian country."  I don't think they were thinking in exactly those terms, but they often did sing about the independent capabilities of the country-born man.



They didn't much care for welfare:





...or affirmative action...



...or government regulations imposed on their business activities.





Some of that's libertarian, but a lot of it's just outlaw.

The LIBOR Scandal

A surprising unity of right and left seems to be forming around the news that American regulators were fully informed of fraudulent LIBOR rates as early as 2007, and chose to do nothing to protect American borrowers, states or localities.  The cost to the American people is unknowable; the additional instability brought on by added mistrust of the banking system, and suspicion that the "regulators" are complicit in ongoing fraud and thievery, could produce additional unknowable costs.

The usual response from the left on this kind of issue is for greater regulation, but here the regulation has demonstrably done nothing to fix the problem.  It's not that they weren't aware, it's that they knew and gave a pass to their buddies.

The guy who was the head of the NY Fed at that time, by the way, is now our Secretary of the Treasury, one Timothy Geithner:   the same Timothy Geithner who became Secretary of the Treasury even though he had massive unpaid taxes; indeed, the same Timothy Geithner who was allowed to pay back the money without penalties by the IRS (try that if you own a small business like, say, the Dawsonville Pool Room).  In other words, when he was caught, he was extended the same kind of look-the-other-way courtesy that he extended to the London bankers.

In both cases, the loser was the American people.  Who were the winners?  What can we say about them, and what ought we to do about them?

Women and Bikes

Via Instapundit, "Women and motorcycles:  ridership is on the rise."  (Alternative title by Arlo Guthrie.)

There still aren't a lot of women bikers, but my wife has taken up riding.  The persistent high gas prices of the last several years finally broke down her sense that they were too scary and dangerous.  Now, she rides everywhere -- rain or shine, city or mountains -- and she's getting pretty good.  She tells me that, for her, it's almost everything she loves about horses, and that she's really come to enjoy just getting on her bike and riding with me.

So if any of you female readers have been thinking about it -- or if you haven't, but reading this is making you think about it -- you might give it a try.  You'll save on gasoline, and you might find a new source of joy in your life to boot.

Actually, This Makes Perfect Sense:

Hot Air is giving him a hard time about it, but really, this is a perfectly accurate description of the President's experience.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

That's just how it really happened for him: it's not that he was smarter than everyone else, or harder working, but he rose from success to success -- from Columbia to Harvard, from Harvard to the University of Chicago, two published autobiographies, two Grammy awards for the audio recordings of those same autobiographies, the Senate, even the Presidency and the Nobel Prize.

He didn't publish at Harvard, didn't do much at U. Chicago, was a failure as a community organizer, didn't succeed in his first push to get elected to public office... but there was always somebody there to dust him off, and push him up to the next rung.

Somebody else made all that happen -- a whole system of somebodies else.  Naturally he feels loyal to the system that raised him so high.  That system includes unions, especially teacher's unions; the academic system, especially affirmative action; and the Democratic Party, especially the Chicago machine and, more recently, the DNC.  At the international level, the community of saints at the UN and the Nobel committee are likewise contributors to his success.  All these people had to work very hard to pull him through to the pinnacle of human achievement.

It's less likely to be true of the small businessman, for whom there may be 'that special teacher,' or a friend or family member who helped them build an initial stake.  On the other hand, there really may not be.  A great deal more comes from individual effort in these cases.

Still, even for those who lack access to the networks and alliances that make it easy for the well-connected to move upwards and onwards with little effort, it surely would be nice to have such access.  And you can get some, if you want, by purchasing dinner with Barack tonight at one of his spectacular fundraising efforts.

Why wouldn't he believe this?  You can't argue with success, and by many measures he is the most successful man in the world.

"Your rejection does not meet my needs at this time"

Admirable anti-rejection letter.

H/t Rocket Science.

Outlaw Country, Part 3: Songs of the New Frontier

We've talked about the way that the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s was involved in bringing the Outlaw movement to endorse a fair amount of the cultural rebellion of that era.



But there was a tension within the music, which was more likely than rock-and-roll to see the value of the era that was passing.  Above is Willie Nelson and Ray Charles singing a Western-style ballad linked to the earlier time.

There were a lot of songs like that, where the old icons are given again in the terms of the new generation.  The old cowboy movies sometimes featured 'girls of the night,' as for example the spirited young lady who played opposite John Wayne in Stagecoach.  Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson picked this up and put it into one of the more famous songs of this type.



Waylon Jennings was an outspoken advocate of moving on to new ways of doing things.  Too many people were trying to re-live the life of Hank Williams, Sr., and he wanted them to know that he wasn't going to play that game.



But, as Gringo pointed out, it was the same Waylon Jennings who took time to pen this tribute to Bob Wills and the Western Swing movement.



So maybe that's three ways in which the changes that came over country music starting in the late 1960s were different from otherwise similar changes in rock-and-roll.  They remained tied to the gospel tradition  They remained faithful to the American serviceman.  Finally, they retained that supernatural loyalty to the American project -- including icons like the cowboy, the flag, and the ideal of riding free on the new frontier.

On the Blessings of Daughters

It was not my fate to have a daughter, but apparently Timothy Dalrymple did.

Your daughter is waiting for you. She will expand and soften your heart. She will make you a better man. A daughter too is a blessing beyond measure. Give yourself to this, and she will make you into a protector and provider.... I have never recovered. After years of scarcely feeling anything, suddenly I found myself broken by grace, shattered with gratitude into a thousand happy pieces....

Every man should have a daughter, if only for his own sanctification. If a daughter comes your way, know the truth that she will love you with all her heart if you let her. Cherish her, and she will be a daddy’s girl. Love her, and your heart will expand to encompass the immensity of her soul. Sacrifice yourself for her, and soon you will discover that you will do just about anything to make her happy.

Cost of Government Day

The year is half over, but we're still not quite to Cost of Government Day this year!

Actually, it turns out that we are if you live in the Great State of Georgia.  The overall number provides an average for state-imposed costs, but you can dig into the by-state numbers later in the report.  It looks like three states -- Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi -- actually managed to hold down costs so that their citizens need only work six months of the year to pay for the cost of government.