Appointed rounds

In 2003, the Bush Administration's blue-ribbon commission to study the United States Postal Service issued a list of recommendations for addressing that organization's chronic problems.  According to the National Association of Letter Carriers (the Postal Service union), the commission pushed several "anti-labor" initiatives, including limitations on collective bargaining rights, erosion of pension and health benefits, and a three-day wait for "continuation of pay" benefits for injured workers.

In 2007, the NALC triumphantly announced that both the House and the Senate had passed a bill by voice vote, signed promptly into law by President Bush in late 2006, that vindicated the NALC's position on every important issue except one:  a compromise had to be reached on the three-day day in injured-worker benefits.  The NALC crowed that it had beaten back the forces of privatization in favor of a vision for modernizing the Postal Service.  The new law, its president said, “preserves our collective bargaining rights, maintains universal, six-day delivery and significantly improves the Service’s long-term financial stability.”

The reference to long-term financial stability apparently concerned squabbles over the Postal Service's funding of pension and retiree health benefits obligations.  In 2003, a pension funding reform initiative had required the establishment of an escrow account.  What's more, the Postal Service objected to Bush administration demands that it cover $27 billion in military pension benefits that had been earned by veterans before they joined the Postal Service.  The 2006 bill gave the Postal Service some flexibility to use part of the retiree-health-benefit escrow account to cover operating expenses, while removing the obligation to fund the military benefits.  Instead, the union "prevailed over the White House" in establishing

a 10-year schedule for using the escrow and military pension savings to dramatically reduce the Postal Service’s massive unfunded liability for retiree health insurance, while also providing some flexibility for other uses. 

In so doing, we secured more than $100 billion for the Postal Service in the decades to come and protected the interests of our current and future retirees, whose health benefits will be fully funded.

Today, the Postal Service is facing a financial crisis and once again beating back the inexorable forces of privatization.  Anti-privatizers suddenly are filling the Net with articles explaining that the Postal Service would be doing fine financially if not for a ridiculous obligation imposed by the dreaded Bush administration in 2006, unfairly requiring it to pre-pay 75 years' worth of retiree health benefits over only 10 years, a burden of about $6 billion of year.  Absent this requirement, they claim, the Postal Service could easily meet its operating expenses.  In addition, although the Postal Service may be in arrears on its obligations to fund future retiree health benefits, it claims to have overfunded its ordinary pension fund, and would like to raid that overage to cover its current shortfalls, a tactic they clearly learned from Bain Capital.

While the wires are burning up with arguments over whether the Postal Service should be privatized, there are the usual quarrels over whether the Constitution requires a postal service (it certainly authorizes one, but I have to laugh at this uncharacteristic originalist fervor), as well as over whether the Postal Service should continue to enjoy a monopoly on non-urgent ordinary letters (competition is allowed only for express service and packages), and over whether the Postal Service still provides a useful service at a reasonable price.  Some supporters go beyond these arguments to the now-familiar complaint that operational reforms would threaten the jobs of deserving middle-class workers, especially minorities.  Some even argue that closing down a number of stand-alone post offices (perhaps replacing many of them with kiosks within big-box stores) would threaten a vital community-gathering spot, as if communities could not figure out how to gather without federal intervention.

European countries are experimenting more freely with postal service modernization.  The Swiss, for instance, scan mail and offer the recipient a choice of e-transmission or physical delivery of a hard copy.  So much volume has been lost in the U.S. to electronic media that the Postal Service now finds itself relying increasingly on high-volume junk mail to make ends meet.   Even there, pro-labor forces find fault:  large companies like FedEx bring in significant revenue by pre-sorting bulk mail and winning a discount from the Postal Service in the amount it would have cost to sort the mail in-house at union rates; FedEx then does it more cheaply with minimum-wage workers.  The Postal Service finds itself increasingly entangled with FedEx, which has taken over the Postal Service's overnight mail operations for a fee, but in return has contracted with the Postal Service for the final leg of deliveries of many consumer packages.

Recent efforts in Congress to break up this mess have been stalled by opposition either to the closing of rural offices, or to the lay-offs of workers, or even (allegedly) by Congressman who would prefer to induce gridlock so that privatization will be the only answer.  The various interest groups certainly seem to be at cross-purposes.  I'm not sure whether the Postal Service should be abolished, but I sure can't see any reason why its monopoly on ordinary mail should be preserved.  Until that happens, how can we reach any sensible conclusions about whether its product is worth its price?

The Economics of DC-Island Politics

Applying the same approach we applied yesterday to Southern politics, let's look at this analyst note on President Obama's 83% approval rating in the District of Columbia:

Some readers might attribute Obama’s rating there solely to his enduring popularity among black voters, but Washington is no longer a majority-black city. (The black population dipped below 50 percent last year.) Obama is popular with nearly everyone in the capital. Among those who work for the government and for government-related businesses — the permanent bureaucracy centered in Washington DC, northern Virginia and southern Maryland — approval of the president remains very high.

Yesterday's article noted, "Virginia might remain a swing state because of the massive number of Federal workers, and those whose interests lie with a rich and powerful Federal government." Today's analyst seems to agree.

How not to apologize

If you're filming an apology to post on YouTube concerning your earlier and universally reviled post on YouTube, and your first instinct is to call it "an apology and . . .," you're probably already on the wrong track.  A real apology takes the form of an expression of genuine regret and perhaps a very brief description of how and when you came to understand that you were wrong.  Full stop.  Do not, repeat not, go on to say "I just felt compelled to act the way I did because of my strong feelings on an important cause, which I now invite you to admire, because you know, you're still very much in the wrong regarding that cause."  Even more urgently, do not take the opportunity to complain about the hate-filled responses you have received objecting to your boorish behavior, or blame others for your initial slowness in issuing your apology, or express dismay at how many people still disagree with your position, or discuss your ambitions to remain an important spokesman for the cause you have just helped to discredit.  In short, get over yourself.

No Time for Protestants

An interesting observation, on the assumption that Romney might win: the power structure of the United States would not include any Protestants in the top elected leadership. The point that the author thinks is very interesting is that nobody seems to have noticed, and in spite of this being a majority-Protestant nation, nobody seems to care.

But notice, too, that unless Romney should choose a veteran for his Vice President, neither presidential candidate nor their vice presidents should have ever served in the military. Mr. Wolf of BLACKFIVE and I were talking about this on the phone the other day. Biden avoided service through five deferments during Vietnam; Obama, of course, was too young for Vietnam and did not elect to serve. Romney had five deferments as well, and then drew a high draft number. If his VP pick is also a non-veteran, it will be the first time I can remember when we didn't at least have the option of a military veteran on the ticket. Bush and Kerry both served; Bob Dole served; George H. W. Bush served; Reagan served; Carter served; Ford served; Nixon served; Kennedy served; I'm not sure how far you'd have to go back to find an election with no servicemen at the top of the ticket, let alone present at all.

Nobody's made a big deal about this either, even though whoever should win this election will have troops deployed in Afghanistan and rising tensions with Iran. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee...

...it looks like Senator Bob Corker's job is pretty safe.

Via the Tennessean, the Tennessee Democratic party has condemned [Tennessee Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate Mark] Clayton, saying in a statement that he is "associated with a known hate group" (a reference to Public Advocate of the United States), and blaming his victory on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot.

You have to have a certain sense of pity for the man. It's so hard to unseat an incumbent, even when your own party doesn't officially disown you!

By the way, "hate group" in this context means a group that was apparently founded to pursue evangelical Christian values, and oppose the gay rights movement. Its platform is here; compare and contrast with, say, the KKK.

Would the Democratic Party care to apply the same standard to these guys? They appear to be guilty of the very same offense.

The Economics of Southern Politics

Politico has an article today entitled "Obama's problems in the South." They talked to some of the right people, but it appears that most of them manifestly fail to understand the economic mechanism at work behind the political division.

But it’s not merely racism that explains why the South remains as politically polarized now as it has ever been. [Not merely. Thanks, guys. --Grim]...

“I worry about where we are,” said Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who has written extensively on the politics of race and culture.... Asked what exactly the president wanted to address, Webb paused before responding: “My observation is that, how can it be that in the party of Andrew Jackson, only 28 percent of white working males support the Democratic Party? It’s difficult to talk about these things.”...

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights hero who bled in Selma, echoed Graham’s concerns.

“It does bother me to see such a division in the South,” Lewis said, adding: “It’s not healthy to have so few white Democratic members from the South.”

The reason the piece fails is demonstrated in its comment about "why the Democratic convention is being held in Charlotte, the prototypical New South city." To understand the mechanism at work in the South, you need to know that the prototypical New South city isn't Charlotte, it's Atlanta.

Atlanta was the "New South" a hundred years ago, and for the same reason Charlotte is today: it's an urban area that serves as the headquarters for finance, large corporations, and a model of production borrowed (like the money that funded it) from the North. It was a place where, in 1880, bankers from Wall Street could come and feel comfortable. People who lived there agreed to adopt the North's basic social and economic system in exchange for access to Northern capital.

Atlanta is no hotbed of liberalism today, although there are enclaves within the city that are. Charlotte won't remain one for the same reason. Once that external capital -- formerly Northern, now international -- generates enough wealth, others will come from around the rest of the South to set up small businesses to serve those enjoying the wealth. As the small businesses become successful, they will give rise to a political class with wealth and leisure to promote their own values -- small business values.

Atlanta is now surrounded by concentric rings of people who aren't part of that core system that was funded by Northern money, and which bound itself to Northern values. In Charlotte, finance is the big business, and that's now led by people with the internationalist mindset that rides behind the World Bank and the UN instead of the old Wall Street leadership. But there are far more Southerners in the South than internationalists, and as they become plumbers or restaurateurs, they will likewise become wealthy enough to be politically active.

With the collapse of large-scale manufacturing industries like the textile industry, too, "white working class" voters in the South work for these small businesses. They know the owners intimately. They understand that their job and the ability of their boss to give them a raise is connected to these same interests. And, more likely than not, they go to the same church.

That's the TEA Party movement in a nutshell: its core is made of small business owners and their families, who are defending the values and interests of small business owners. Those values are the traditional values of the Christian work ethic (now supplemented by many who follow the surprisingly similar Hindu or Chinese work ethic), and the family unit as the locus of social support and success. Their interests are low taxes and cutting back on the regulatory state.

That's also why the TEA Party isn't a Southern movement: you see it across the country, embracing the same set of folks. The movement is just stronger in the South because the South is where the main large-scale industry collapsed first. Textile mills and sewing factories were once a major employer of the white working class in the South, and they're all gone to Mexico. The unions are gone too.

So Virginia might remain a swing state because of the massive number of Federal workers, and those whose interests lie with a rich and powerful Federal government. North Carolina isn't going to remain a swing state: Charlotte is just the next Atlanta.

If Jim Webb and John Lewis want the South back, it's available: the Democratic Party just has to return to supporting the values and interests of the voters. Those are, broadly speaking, Christian values, low taxes, and less regulation. They are opposed to broad-scale social experimentation, government-based social programs that require high taxes to fund them, and crony capitalism that favors large companies and international finance. This includes regulatory schemes that raise the bar of entry so that smaller businesses can't afford to compete. It just happens to be the case that, right now, the Democratic Party is unified behind all those projects that Southerners dislike.

I think Jim Webb is right about Jackson: Southerners also want a strong military, and a leader they can look up to as an exemplar of personal honor. It wouldn't hurt to nominate somebody who felt the same way.

Understanding Slaveowners

Before I forget, the piece that Lars Walker wrote was linked to another article of his, on the difficulties we encounter in teaching young Americans how to understand the mindset of slaveowning ancestors.

Here's the embarrassing truth in civilization's closet: it demands cheap labor. The philosopher can't meditate, the artist can't paint or sculpt, the astronomer can't contemplate the heavens, if he has to spend the bulk of his time tending his own fields, caring for his own livestock, or cleaning his own house. The higher the civilization, the more slaves it requires. It was like that from the beginning of the world until the Industrial Revolution. (There was a brief break in parts of Europe following the Black Death, but that was a demographic anomaly, it seems to me.)

The Industrial Revolution (a blessing from God, in my opinion) made it increasingly possible to carry on the work of civilization using machines rather than slaves for the scut work. And as soon as that happened, the scales fell from the eyes of the Christians, and they said, "Hey! I never noticed it before, but this slavery business is really cruel."...

Understanding these facts doesn't justify slavery. All it does is make it understandable. It opens a door of human sympathy to people who were different from us.

By way of which, let me recommend to you one of the most interesting and entertaining works of history you will ever encounter: Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg's Honor & Slavery. I'm sure I've mentioned it before (for example here). It is subtitled, "Lies, duels, noses, masks, dressing as a woman, gifts, strangers, humanitarianism, death, slave rebellions, the proslavery argument, baseball, hunting, and gambling in the Old South."

In addition to being hugely entertaining and informative, for many of you there is a personal reason to read the book. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably feel as I do that honor is and ought to be a major motivating value in your life. Dr. Greenberg's book is a helpful way to deepen your understanding of how honor was practiced in an earlier generation, and also to demonstrate some of the perils of honor as a value system.

I remain entirely committed to living by the old code -- which I take to be far older than the period of American slavery -- but I think reading the book helped me understand better how to do it without falling prey to the traps that captured our ancestors. Rarely can anyone deeply understand an organic system to which they do not belong -- an outside observer of a religion or a culture has a huge task simply to understand the system. Dr. Greenberg not only came to understand, at least in part, his perspective usefully improved my understanding of a system I was born into. That's a high accomplishment for a scholar.

Science Fiction Metaphors

Lars Walker links to a piece on Inca society, which mysteriously managed to create a vast empire without inventing a few things we take to be pretty important: money and markets. They did have corporations, sort of:

The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.

Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. In another quirk of the Incan economy, nobles who died could still own property and their families or estate managers could continue to amass wealth for the dead nobles. Indeed, the temple at Pachacamac was basically a well-managed estate that "belonged" to a dead Incan noble. It's as if the Inca managed to invent the idea of corporations-as-people despite having almost no market economy whatsoever.

Mr. Walker points out that the fascination shown by the authors is a mark of fairly remarkable ignorance. The nature of the society is not hard to understand at all, as it turns out. He links to James Lileks, who draws the same conclusion.

What I find amusing is the contrast in the comments threads at the original piece versus the comments at Lileks' place. They both devolve into science fiction metaphors based on the assumption of the readership about what they're seeing.

From the original:

Dunny0 03 Jan 2012 3:39 PM
So, they were the Federation then.
Gotcha.

allium @Dunny0
Coronado was misinformed - the Seven Cities of Gold-Pressed Latinum were to the south, not the north.

a cat named scruffy - former dj @Dunny0
The Federation with human sacrifice of children.
I suspect Picard would disapprove.

So it's sort of like Star Trek, then. A kind of ideal society, to which we might aspire! Minus the human sacrifice, of course.

Lileks' readers seem to grasp the situation better:

Lewis_Wetzel
I saw the Inca story as well. Money is a means of exchange and store of value. IT"S PEOPLE! YOU"VE GOT TO TELL THEM! INCA MONEY IS PEOPLE!

The Birth and Death of a Rail Town

Since the Thunder Road piece was such a hit, how about one linking a gorgeous Western with a real-life story about ghost towns on the rail lines? (H/t: Fark.)



If you haven't seen this movie, you ought to. You're going to want to see it more than once, so set aside some time.

Why, Yes, I Did Get A Check

Taranto is on to the shell game:

The federal government has been making such too-good-to-be-true offers for decades--the "Social Security" game dates all the way back to 1935--but such scams seem to be multiplying of late. An example appears on the White House website under the heading "Did You Get a Check?"

"Because of the new health care law," the site explains, "insurance providers are now required to devote at least 80 percent of the premiums you pay to your health care--not to advertising, or administrative costs, or salaries for their CEOs. . . . Companies that aren't meeting the standard are actually providing rebates to their customers."

As a matter of fact, I did get a check from my insurance company thanks to the new health care law.

I burned it.

I didn't ask anyone to step in between me and the company I'd made an agreement with in good faith. They kept their part of the bargain, and I'm not about to fail to keep mine.

However, the next letter I got from my insurance company sadly explains that my premiums are about to go way up. I wonder what could possibly have raised the cost of insuring us so much? Perhaps all those new services they're required to offer me for free? Whatever it was, the check I got -- had I cashed it -- would not have begun to cover the difference in price.

The insurer invited me to continue to enjoy my current benefits for quite a bit more, or to move to one of their other plans if I prefer. They said they could afford to offer me a plan at a similar rate to the old plan if we raise the annual deductible by a thousand dollars.

I imagine that, should I accept this invitation, in a couple of years that option will be gone as well. Such high-deductible plans won't meet the required standards, and I'd be fined if I accepted the offer.

Thanks for the check, though.

Teachers unite

. . . but not to teach, unfortunately.  Louisiana recently passed a bill to expand school vouchers for kids in failing schools.  The teachers unions are not big fans of the initiative.  The opening legal salvo of one of the state's largest teachers union (together with 47 local affiliates) is a lawsuit seeking an injunction on state constitutional grounds.  The lawsuit flopped at the initial stage but will go up on appeal.

As a backup strategy, the union has sent threatening letters to the private schools that expect to receive voucher funds, asking them to return a letter acknowledging that there are serious constitutional problems with receiving the money, and promising to refuse to accept it for the time being.  Otherwise, of course, the union threatens them with a lawsuit as well.

Competition is uncomfortable.

Another Perspective on Gridlock

Lately we've been discussing at VC the question of 'Gridlock good, compromise bad,' or 'Compromise good, gridlock bad?' The Hill proposes that both gridlock and compromise are good in their proper hour: what is bad is irresponsibility.

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.
And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Another instance of budding bipartisanship is the pork-laden farm bill that extends sugar subsidies, maintains crop subsidies and creates a “shallow-loss program” that effectively guarantees incomes for farmers at a time when that sector is doing historically well. The bill passed the Senate with 16 GOP votes. Though the House version of the bill is still being worked out, no one doubts it will not only pass, but largely resemble the Senate version.

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government.

Discuss.

Moonshiners of Dawson County

Once a year in the cool fall weather, Dawsonville, Georgia, hosts the Mountain Moonshine Festival.  Since moonshine is illegal, however, the main feature is a car show -- especially restored old classic moonshiner rods that they used to use to run the shine down into Atlanta, and elsewhere.

However!  Lo and behold, somebody actually got a permit out of the state of Georgia to make moonshine for lawful sale.  The old times are here again, except for the illegal hotrodding.

Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery joins Milledgeville –based Georgia Distilling Co. as two of only a handful of “legal” moonshine producers in the country.

“We are testing equipment now that we have the green light from the state,” Dawsonville Moonshine owner Cheryl Wood told The Gainesville Times. “We will be in production in August.”

The distillery will rely on a 250-gallon copper still, two 415-gallon stainless steel mash tanks, a 1,050-gallon stainless steel mash tank and an ample supply of grains and sugar. It will sell its bottled corn liquor to a wholesaler, which will then supply it to a distributor, who will sell the product to retailers.

The company wants the liquor ready for the 45th annual Mountain Moonshine Festival on Oct. 26-28, according to the Times.

Sounds like a good time. In spite of the 90-proof high test, it'll be a family-friendly event. The high school marching band will come play, and there will be a lot of old cars and folks who are really proud of all the work they've put into making them shiny again.

You may remember this old movie, starring Robert Mitchum. See 11:11 and following.

Grim Cooking: Frijoles Charros

You may remember my preference for outdoor cooking in the summertime, to keep the heat out of the house.  This is never wiser than when cooking with dried beans, which need hours of soaking and then hours of heat to maximize their softeness.

Frijoles Charros is such a recipe.  There are a number of variations on it, but it follows the old frontier model of dried beans and salt pork as its base.  You saw plenty of versions of this north of the border as well.  "Pork and beans" is an easy staple, and the base ingredients don't require refrigeration.

Here's a fancy version of the recipe, involving chorizo sausage. The version you see being cooked here omits the sausage and bacon in favor of more sugar-cured salt pork, because that's just what I happen to have on hand today.  We're using home grown peppers and tomatoes.  The oregano came from our herb garden.

The key to cooking beans over the fire is to revisit it regularly to stir the pot and add fresh, cold water.  When the beans are tender, it should be ready to go.

Originalism and the IRS

Apparently the IRS doesn't think any more of altering the law by executive fiat than the Labor Department. It creates an interesting question.

A July 18 report by the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon has revealed a critical flaw in the Obamacare law that could ultimately prove to be its undoing. Namely, if states refuse to set up an insurance exchange under the law, the federal government lacks authorization to dispense some $800 billion in subsidies through a federally operated exchange.

This is important because, coupled with states’ option to implement the Medicaid expansion or not, it appears the key player in defunding Obamacare going forward will be the states. The Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare found that the law’s mandatory Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, effectively giving states an opt-out provision that many now plan to take.

In short, if states refuse to expand Medicaid, and there is no funding for the insurance exchanges, Obamacare will effectively be defunded.

To deal with this flaw, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on May 24 simply issued a regulation effectively rewriting the law that would allow the federal government to fund the exchanges.

On the one hand, clearly the Democrats who passed the ACA never even thought of the possibility that the States would simply refuse to play along. Congressional intent -- at least Democratic Congressional intent, since no Republicans voted for the ACA -- was that these exchanges should exist, and be government-funded. It's easy to imagine that, if they had realized the States might not play along, the Democratic Congress who passed the ACA would have included authority for the Federal government to do it instead.

The problem is, the law doesn't say that the Federal government can do it. There's no authority in the statute, and the Congress that approved the ACA doesn't exist any more. It was explicitly rejected by the People in 2010's landslide elections. The current Congress wouldn't approve this change to the law.

So... is the IRS doing the right thing, following the original Congress' apparent intent by revising the law on the fly in a way that older Congress would have approved? Or is it violating the separation of powers by not deferring the legislative question to the current Congress, or to the next one?

Runoffs & A Landslide

Looks like the Mighty 9th is going to a runoff. It's a shame we can't send them both to Congress, really. Dan Collins is endorsed by Zell Miller, and an old mountain friend of the family with a good legislative history. Martha(!) is a conservative firebrand. It almost doesn't matter which one wins: Collins has more actual experience on the job, but Martha(!) is a committed TEA Party activist.

Meanwhile, back in my old ancestral home of Forsyth County, the sheriff looks like he'll have to fight his re-election in a runoff too. You want to know how hard it is to boot out an incumbent sheriff in the Great State of Georgia? This hard:

In that heated race, Paxton seeks to overcome a January incident in which deputies and firefighters found the married sheriff unconscious in the doorway of the home of a female friend who told authorities the sheriff had been drinking. The sheriff denied being drunk.

Used to be even the District Attorneys in Georgia referred to the sheriffs as "the Dixie Mafia." It's a surprisingly powerful office. Our incumbent looks to have been re-elected too, without a runoff, though in a closely-fought election. That's to the good, from my perspective. He's a former Marine, keeps his word, and also he keeps his resources concentrated in the urban parts of the county. We don't see them out here, and that suits me fine.

No runoff for T-SPLOST. The tax increase died in a bloodbath.

Cynic, Justified:

The meat-axe budgetary process called "sequestration" will disproportionately target Defense spending, mandating the loss of untold thousands of jobs starting in January of next year. Many of these will be jobs in private industry that support the Department of Defense, but many more will be actual government jobs.

So I wasn't surprised to see the headline, as Drudge put it, "White House scrambles to prevent defense cut pinkslips before election." I assumed that this meant the White House was trying to pressure key Democratic leadership to do something about the sequestration issue before the upcoming deadline, which is the end of this fiscal year.

I have to admit to having been shocked by their actual tactic.

Obama's Labor Department on Monday issued "guidance" to the states, telling them that a federal law requiring advance notice of mass layoffs does not apply to the layoffs that may occur in January as a result of automatic budget cuts known as "sequestration."

I had thought I was getting dangerously cynical, but in all honesty I would never have guessed they'd stoop to this. It's not that we're going to scramble to save your job; we're just going to scramble to make sure you don't find out you'll be fired until after the election. And we're not going to scramble to change the law that requires the notification, which we don't have the votes to do; we'll just issue "guidance" that the law contains an unstated exception.

What happens if a corporation or a contractor decides to issue notifications anyway, in compliance with the actual law? After this, I'd have to guess that they will be punished in some way. Perhaps they'll find it hard to get future contracts; perhaps instructions will go out that they be first on the chopping block.

I had hoped to discover that I was being too pessimistic about the health of our institutions. Clearly the opposite was true. We'll have to adjust elevation and windage, I guess: down and left.

Freedom, guns, and butter

Steyn is irresistible this week:

Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys when it comes to dairy products.  On the roads, on the cheese board, in health care, in banking privacy, and in a zillion other areas of life, many Europeans now have more freedom than Americans. 

For the record, I'm consistent in these matters — I want it all:  assault weapons and unpasteurized Camembert, guns and butter.  Certainly, cheese makes a poor attitudinal rallying cry:  "I'm proud to be a Frenchman, where at least I know my Brie!"

Election Day

The biggest issue on the ballot today is the T-SPLOST, which remains a very tight contest down to the wire.

If you like me live in the 9th Congressional District, though, you're electing a Congressman today. There's no way that district is going to vote for the winner of the Democratic primary, so the winner of today's Republican contest will be the victor in November as well.

This is one of the hot TEA Party races this year, too. The favorite of the Republican establishment is facing an insurgent campaign from one Martha Zoller, who apparently is a "radio talk show host, conservative swashbuckler, and Tea Party favorite."

I was initially suspicious of Ms. Zoller based on her advertising campaign, which made billboards that read just "Martha!" That kind of thing smacks of the cult of personality, although Hillary(!) did it too, and nobody ever mistook her for a charismatic. I voted for her in the Democratic Primary in 2008, and I'm only sorry she didn't win it.

It's an interesting race for another reason, which is that the counties voting today aren't necessarily the counties that the new Representative will represent. By the same token, many of the voters in today's 9th will actually be represented by the winner of the 10th district contest, in which they have no say today.

That's a strange way to do business.

As green as you can afford to be

Walter Russell Mead on environmentalism as a luxury good:

An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people.  Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away.  Nor will they vote George Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power.  They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them. 

But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed.  We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure.  A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them.

And, as he points out, greens should be glad Gaia in her ineffable wisdom put the oil share here instead of in, say, Nigeria or North Korea.

H/t Ace.

Born to hunt

Despite my professional sympathy, this is a chilling insight into the uncompromising fierceness of the scariest fish:

Sand tiger foetuses ‘eat each other in utero, acting out the harshest form of sibling rivalry imaginable’.  Only two babies emerge, one from each of the mother shark’s uteruses:  the survivors have eaten everything else.  ‘A female sand tiger gives birth to a baby that’s already a metre long and an experienced killer,’ . . . .

A new book, Demon Fish, receives an approving review from Theo Tait in the London Review of Books.  Tait muses over our disproportionate reaction to the shark danger:

Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark.  Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year.  Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years.

Sure, tell that to my amygdala.  As the reviewer concedes, they're down there below the surface, and they eat us alive.  My amygdala doesn't find Christmas ornaments daunting in the least.  No one's going to make a fortune directing a blockbuster movie about people that stab themselves with glass icicles, or whatever it is they do to put themselves into hospitals at Yuletide (sounds like there's an untold story there).

The Reading Summer Dance

From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 871:

A.D. 871. This year came the army to Reading in Wessex; and in
the course of three nights after rode two earls up, who were met
by Alderman Ethelwulf at Englefield; where he fought with them,
and obtained the victory. There one of them was slain, whose
name was Sidrac. About four nights after this, King Ethered and
Alfred his brother led their main army to Reading, where they
fought with the enemy; and there was much slaughter on either
hand, Alderman Ethelwulf being among the skain; but the Danes
kept possession of the field. And about four nights after this,
King Ethered and Alfred his brother fought with all the army on
Ashdown, and the Danes were overcome. They had two heathen
kings, Bagsac and Healfden, and many earls; and they were in two
divisions; in one of which were Bagsac and Healfden, the heathen
kings, and in the other were the earls. King Ethered therefore
fought with the troops of the kings, and there was King Bagsac
slain; and Alfred his brother fought with the troops of the
earls, and there were slain Earl Sidrac the elder, Earl Sidrac
the younger, Earl Osbern, Earl Frene, and Earl Harold. 

They put both the troops to flight; there were many thousands of the
slain, and they continued fighting till night. Within a
fortnight of this, King Ethered and Alfred his brother fought
with the army at Basing; and there the Danes had the victory.
About two months after this, King Ethered and Alfred his brother
fought with the army at Marden. They were in two divisions; and
they put them both to flight, enjoying the victory for some time
during the day; and there was much slaughter on either hand; but
the Danes became masters of the field; and there was slain Bishop
Heahmund, with many other good men. After this fight came a vast
army in the summer to Reading. And after the Easter of this year
died King Ethered. He reigned five years, and his body lies at
Winburn-minster. Then Alfred, his brother, the son of Ethelwulf,
took to the kingdom of Wessex. And within a month of this, King
Alfred fought against all the Army with a small force at Wilton,
and long pursued them during the day; but the Danes got
possession of the field. This year were nine general battles
fought with the army in the kingdom south of the Thames; besides
those skirmishes, in which Alfred the king's brother, and every
single alderman, and the thanes of the king, oft rode against
them; which were accounted nothing. This year also were slain
nine earls, and one king; and the same year the West-Saxons made
peace with the army.

Since Tex Wants to Talk Fashion...

...how would you like to learn about bras from the 1400s? Believe it or not, this represents a serious revision of our understanding of historic costume.

In an interview with Associated Press, Beatrix Nutz, the lead archaeologist for the find, said, “We didn’t believe it ourselves,” she said in a telephone call from the Tyrolean city of Innsbruck. “From what we knew, there was no such thing as bra-like garments in the 15th century.”

Up to now there was nothing to indicate the existence of bras with clearly visible cups before the 19th century. Medieval written sources are rather vague on the topic of female breast support....

Doubtless they were discreet. Even in my lifetime, we used to refer to these things as "unmentionables."

Mustard Seeds

Some years ago, the king of Thailand ordered that his subjects make lots of origami doves. These doves, symbols of peace, were to be airdropped into the southern portion of Thailand, a place called Pattani after an older, Islamic kingdom.

Fifty Thai aircraft distributed one hundred and twenty million paper doves, in an attempt to demonstrate good will to the people of that restive province.

Did it work? Of course it did not. The local insurgents passed a rumor that the doves were coated with contact poison, and that it was all a plot to kill off the Muslim population. Whether or not the local peasantry believed the rumors, peace still has not come to Southern Thailand.

Yet we can admire the spirit of the thing, even if in practical fact it did not work. It was a nice try, a fine and a romantic deed. Perhaps a few of those doves fell on a heart ready to receive the message; perhaps someday we may yet see a wild crop grow out of that good soil.

I feel much the same way about the Swedes who recently piloted a single small plane into the forbidden airspace of Belarus, and air-dropped teddy bears on parachutes with messages of freedom. (Thanks to Tom for passing this one along).

The stiff hand of tyranny is not so easily moved, but it was a bold and romantic gesture. Perhaps a few of the messages will resonate. Perhaps we may yet see a crop grow out of the rare seed that fell on good ground.

Distribution

Not quite in time for its 100th anniversary, the Panama Canal is undergoing a widening project that may generate a cascade of changes for American ports and distribution systems.  Higher fuels costs are pushing shippers to use larger, slower vessels.  Access to the canal would make the trip to East Coast or Gulf Coast ports only about two weeks slower than delivery to the West Coast, and slightly cheaper; what's more, it avoids the increasing problems of congestion in West Coast ports.  Norfolk, Virginia, already can accommodate 50-foot drafts.  Charleston and Savannah have plans in place for deeper-water ports.  All these southeastern ports have some cost advantages over New York, whose sky-high real estate costs require costly drayage to send goods to Pennsylvania or New Jersey for storage before ultimate transport.  The Gulf Coast, I'm afraid, is bringing up the rear, but there are possibilities here as well.

When I was a kid in school, they were always trying to teach us about distribution systems, but I never could understand how anyone could be interested.  I suppose I thought everything magically appeared where people needed to use it.  Now the process fascinates me:  all that intricate balancing of supply and demand, speed and cost, so vulnerable to disruption and so ready to repair itself if allowed.  I'd love a chance to pick the brain of the supply analyst who's quoted at length in the linked article; he seems to have a birds-eye view.

H/t Photon Courier.

The great escape

C.S. Lewis on how unnatural it is to be a gentle hero:

The knight is . . . not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. . . . 

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.  It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson.  It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . . 

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections -- those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle -- for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed.  When this disassociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair.  The ancient history of the Near East is like that.  Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilization.  Then they become civilized themselves and go soft.  Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. . . . 

The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.

~ Present Concerns, "The Necessity of Chivalry" (1st published in Time and Tide, Aug. 1940).

Fly Abatement

This is a fantastic idea. There are always flies around a horse farm, and fly abatement is one of the things we spend a fair amount of time (and some money) dealing with. It's necessary, but never fun... until now.

Manolo loves the shoes

I wear the same pair of shoes 365 days a year, but it doesn't prevent my enjoying Manolo's Shoe Blog.  What could be more charming than elegant, expensive shoes that someone else buys and wears for my entertainment?  Today The Manolo gives thoughtful advice to a reader who wishes to spiff up her husband:

The Manolo frequently gets the plaintive missives from the women who wish to restyle their men folk into something more put-together, something less sloppy, rustic, disastrous, and/or menacing.   “Manolo,” they frequently cry out, “my husband dresses as if he were Larry the Cable Guy’s younger, messier brother.  Please help.”

This is not a problem I encounter. If anything my husband probably is shaking his own head in forlorn sympathy.  The Manolo suggests discrete gifts and praise for the significant other, but personally, I rather like a man who is sloppy, rustic, disastrous, and/or menacing.  I distantly admire one who is well put-together, but as a kind of pet:  someone I'd want to pair with one of the women who would wear those fabulous shoes.  We would watch them gambol in the yard, perhaps put on dance music for them.

The Manolo also showcases Helen Mirren this week, a stylish, intelligent actress I always enjoy watching at work.  I just borrowed a copy of "The Queen" from a friend and found it a first-rate production with a fine screenplay.  When Tony Blair first visits the Queen, he is awkward and abashed but a bit full of himself as the youngest PM ever.  The Queen calmly notes that he is her tenth Prime Minister.  The first was Winston Churchill.  Like Churchill, Blair was destined to ride high then be dashed on the rocks, but the Queen is still there.

A Surprising Turn in the Quest for El Cid

Another book I've been reading lately -- I tend to read several at once -- is Dr. Richard Fletcher's The Quest for El Cid. The first five chapters dig into Spanish history as at that time, chiefly the Islamic portions but with some introduction to the Christian kingdoms that were clinging to the mountainous north. Then suddenly Chapter Six begins thus:

While the caliphate of Cordoba was in its death-throes and Fernando I was learning the art of government in Castile, another struggle was being played out several hundred miles to the north. In the summer of 1030 Olaf Haraldson, the recently ousted king of Norway, tried to win his land back from the regents who were governing it in the name of the great Canute, ruler of Denmark and England. Olaf was defeated and killed at the battle of Stiklestad... he was to be venerated as a saint, St. Olave [sic]. In the battle he had been aided by his young half-brother Harald, son of a member of one of Norway's many princely dynasties, a chieftain known as Sigurd Sow.

Yes, I know this story very well. I once wrote a poem about Sigurd Sow. It was part of a novel I wrote in China -- never published, and almost lost, but that a dear and beloved friend of mine happened to keep a copy.

This is another of the old poems, in the form of a drapa. A drapa is a flokk with a refrain, so that it was sometimes called a draepling. It was a high form of Norse poetry fit for extolling the father of a great king; but Sigurd Syr, as he was known in the Heimskringla, was not a great warrior. How to praise him in the old Norse terms?

This is a rather technical form, and the references are obscure if you aren't versed in Norse mythology and the older sagas. Still, not many try the drapa these days, so it may be of interest to some of you.

Rare the good king not a killer,
wise sleeper in his stronghold.
Ox-slain Egil Yngling
the Thing-thrall put to fleeing:
A dead king never dreaded.
When Old Starkad came to Sweden
Haki then Hugleik's land claimed. --
Where now is the hall-holder...

Aun, always the weak-slayer,
his sired he'd Odhinn offer;
He ran before Upsala's chieftain.
But Yngvar's son, Anund the Breaker,
Took the war-shield only
slaying his father's slayer.
Rare few are remembered wiser --
...the kingdom-ruler of wisdom?

One remembered is Sigurd
stepfather to the Digre,
father of the Hardrada,
Old lord of the northhold.
Shade from his hat, that broad-brim,
we remember as rain without thunder. --
Where now is the hall-holder,

Nothing with him dragons wanted,
Nor warriors who disdained golden
Grain. Loved him thrall and bonder:
He cared for cattle, but battle
He found empty of the glory
That forever draws the fighter.
No man’s thralls were freer. --
The kingdom-ruler of wisdom.

More from Mr. Steyn

From "Don't Cross the Forces of Tolerance," about the quivering sensibility of the leaders of Boston and Chicago in the face of the outrageous preference of Chick-Fil-A's president for first wives and Biblical principles:

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster's head left in Mr. Cathy's bed was all just a misunderstanding.  Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston's Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective.  As the Boston Herald's Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death.  The mayor couldn't have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi.  Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi's position on gays is in a state of "evolution":  He can't decide whether to burn them or toss 'em off a cliff.  "Some say we should throw them from a high place," he told Al-Jazeera.  "Some say we should burn them, and so on.  There is disagreement . . . .  The important thing is to treat this act as a crime."  Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded:  There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one?  In Mayor Menino's Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he'll run your homophobic ass out of town.  But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he'll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

* * * 

But political winds shift.  Once upon a time, Massachusetts burned witches.  Now it grills chicken-sandwich homophobes.  One day it'll be something else.  Already in Europe, in previously gay-friendly cities like Amsterdam, demographically surging Muslim populations have muted Leftie politicians' commitment to gay rights, feminism and much else.   It's easy to cheer on the thugs when they're thuggish in your name.  What happens when Emanuel's political needs change?

A Recommendation: God and Logic in Islam

I want to take a moment to praise a book I have been reading recently. It's a new book by a professor at Indiana University named John Walbridge, entitled God And Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason.

In his introduction he writes that he had three readers in mind: the educated Westerner who may not be fully aware of Islam's intensely rational and scholastic history, but only of the Islam they see on the news; the Muslim reader who is troubled by the crisis of his faith; and the scholar of Islamic studies. He asks these readers to be patient with each other's needs -- the Islamic scholar with the careful spelling out of terms, for example, or the Western reader with the brief history of Western philosophical thought and its effect on modern politics in the West.

His second chapter -- entitled "The Diversity of Reason" -- is surely the chapter that ought most to require my patience, and yet I found it to be extremely insightful reading. I don't think I've ever read such a successful attempt to explain the roots of the clashes in the modern West in concise, brief strokes. The whole chapter is fourteen pages long, and well worth reading even for the educated Westerner who is well aware of the history and accustomed to studying it in much greater detail.

Neither was I disappointed in the rest of the work, which touches on an area I am becoming more and more interested in as time goes along. In any case, for those you seeking a good book for understanding the intellectual tradition of Islam, I must recommend this as an excellent introduction to the subject. Those of you who do not need an introduction, but are ready for more advanced thoughts, will likewise not be disappointed. Well done, Dr. Walbridge.

Poor Mann

Michael ("Hockey Stick") Mann has reached the questionable conclusion that it's a good idea to sue Mark Steyn for defamation, thus setting up a public court battle over the truth of Steyn's allegations concerning ClimateGate.  The quarrel grows out of Steyn's quotation from, and partial agreement with, an attempt to equate Prof. Mann with Jerry Sandusky, not on the subject of pederasty, but because the Sandusky affair calls into question the value of any internal investigation of the ethics of a poohbah at Penn State.  Mann, you may recall, was formally investigated by the university in the wake of ClimateGate, a scandal that earned him the affectionate nickname of "Piltdown" Mann on AGW-skeptic sites.  He received, if not a glowing vindication, at least a dim one -- an acquittal on three counts and a hung jury on the fourth.  Given Louis Freeh's harsh assessment of Penn State's ability to police itself in the context of the Sandusky scandal, it's natural to wonder how vigorously the same university was prepared to scrutinize Mann's affairs.  Penn State has not demonstrated a courageous willingness to embarrass any of its media stars or cash cows in the pursuit of doing what's right.

Mr. Steyn engaged in a bit of apophasis by quoting from another author's harsher article, then stating (without much conviction) that he didn't approve of its excesses in equating the two scandals.  He is a humorist, and given to dramatic and ironic expression.  He set a trap for Mann, who can't complain about the implicit equation of academic fraud with child molesting without continually drawing attention to the linkage himself -- which he's already begun doing, and on Facebook, yet.  Without this squawking, how many people would even remember that Mann was at Penn State, like Sandusky, and that he once was cleared of academic fraud by a university panel?

I look forward to Mann's attempt to prove that Steyn said anything untrue about his scientific data management, a process that, complete with testimony under oath and discovery of emails, may be better calculated to shed light on the controversy than any prior internal investigation.  What's more, as Pundit/Pundette pointed out, the last guys who sued Steyn for defamation not only lost, they set in motion a process that got the underlying Canadian libel statute repealed as an abuse of the freedom of speech in that country.

Mission Accomplished

"We tried our plan.  It worked."

Well, I guess it's a question of what the plan was meant to achieve.

It's been borne in upon me that to associate the President with dishonesty or failure is irreducibly racist. (To dip even further into the crazy punchbowl, try this theory.)  So I will take him at his word, and believe he was successful on his own terms.

An Interview with Women in the All-Army Military Combatives Tournament

The Army military combative program is a strange sort of martial art: it is designed not to hurt people. I talked to Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill about that some years ago when he was the top NCO for MNF-I; he is currently the CSM for ISAF. I asked him about the move to a system based on Brazilian sport jujitsu, which has rules designed less to simulate combat than to prevent injury. Here's what he said:

I can't really say that I can recall an instance where -- at least during my watch and probably, you know, months leading up to my watch -- that a service member had been required to use combatives. So their hand-to-hand training, I mean, it is -- it is there if needed.... you know, a unit that conducts combative training, they kind of go into the training knowing that they're going to have some soldiers injured -- and, you know, hopefully not seriously injured, but someone that's going to probably miss some training hours within the next, you know, few days because of sprain, pulls or things like that.

And that comes from, you know, it comes from a number of things, but mostly from just working something that you haven't worked in a while, or not learning how to fall, because we've got to teach you how to fall before you start doing flips and kicks. So yes there is a concern about the loss of training time due to injuries sustained doing combative training.

If the intent is to increase confidence and avoid crippling injuries, the program must be considered a success. One area where it has really boosted confidence is for female soldiers, because there is no separation in competitive class by sex. There is separation by weight, so women don't end up fighting men who are much larger than they are, but that is all.

Several women who fought in this year's tournament were interviewed by Sports Illustrated, and talk about their experiences and thoughts on the issue of men and women in combat, and in combatives. It makes for interesting reading given our occasional discussion of the issues. The women seem to be strong advocates of not dividing the sport by sex, and appear to be commonly more put-off by men who won't fight them equally hard than by men who try to beat them down. Yet -- SI says "perhaps because of" their experience fighting men in their weight class -- they aren't interested in joining the infantry.

Perhaps because of their fighting experience, female competitors express nuanced views on the roles of women in combat. "If we can meet the demands, if there's absolutely no changing the standards, there shouldn't be an issue," Carlson says. "Do I see myself breaking down that barrier? No, I don't."

De Santis, who finished her five-year service with the Marines last January and is pursuing a professional MMA career, says her experiences as an instructor make her hesitant to advocate placing women on the front lines with the Marine Corps. No woman had been able to complete a specialized, seven-week, hand-to-hand combat course at the Martial Arts Center for Excellence. "I'm a female fighter and I'm all about female rights but I've pushed myself to my limits and beyond," she says, "But [men and women], physically, they are two different body types. To offer up, to force females into that [combat] field, isn't a good idea. But on a positive note, I see it progressing. I see more women trying to focus and learn in the mixed martial arts."

De Santis is right about the body type difference. With weight equalized, more of the male body will be muscle and bone. That's something that she's had to come up against directly. I wonder what answer they would get if they asked the men who fought these women the same question.

I've taught women martial arts -- not sport stuff, but killing stuff -- and trained with female students while learning new arts myself. I am neither one of those who won't hit them, nor one who tries to crush them. I think you owe it to your training partner to give them the full benefit of the training, but we didn't break out by weight, either, so some restraint was necessary to avoid gratuitous injury. I try to give them as much as they can handle and a little more, so they get the full benefit of the training, but aren't forced out of the program by injury and remain encouraged to continue.

All the same, I don't think you can argue with this statement from Staff Sergeant Spottedbear, a female drill instructor:

"Imagine what it's like whenever a female gets in the arena with a man and she starts to lose," says Larsen. "It's a fight. He's on top of her, punching her in the face. You have to be hardened to the idea -- you have to really believe -- that women can be treated equally to be able to put up with that. To accept that as the cost of equality."

I have to admit that I've never punched a woman in the face or the head, but that's part of the restraint issue given the weight and muscle differential. You can really hurt someone that way. I have struck women in the head with training swords, though, because the fencing mask is adequate protection.

I have punched other men in the head, and it's really satisfying when you land a good blow and they roll on the floor. I have to admit that I don't think I'd enjoy it if it were a woman I'd just hit. My commitment to equality, I suppose, doesn't go as far as equally enjoying punching them!

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.