Rick Perry Says States Can Ban Guns(!)

I suppose one could get that reading out of the plain language Gov. Perry used here, although I don't think that's what he meant. Saying precisely what he meant was not his strong point in the Presidential debates either, so it's no surprise that he may have phrased this the wrong way.

When it gets back to this issue of taking guns away from law abiding citizens and somehow know this will make our country safer, I don’t agree with that. I think most people in Texas don’t agree with that, and that is a state by state issue frankly that should be decided in the states and not again a rush to Washington, D.C. to centralize the decision making, and them to decide what is in the best interest for the citizens and the people of Florida and Texas. That’s for the people of these states to decide.

What he's actually saying is that he doesn't want the Federal government to undertake to enact any gun control laws; if he wants any new gun control laws, he'll pursue them in Texas. Fair enough.

It almost sounds like he's advocating for a 10th Amendment reading, but actually this is one case where the 10th does not apply. The relevant authority is quite clearly mapped elsewhere:

From Article I, Section 8, listing powers Congress shall have:

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Amendment Two:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It sounds as though Congress has the authority to regulate the "arming" of the militia, provided that such regulation does not "infringe" upon the right of the People to keep and bear arms. There may be several readings here, but this appears to be a case where it actually is the Federal and not the state government that has whatever power there is to be had.

To The Ones Who Understand:

The SEALs were also circumspect about death in a way that only those confronted with it regularly can be.

“I either want to die in combat, doing my job right now, or live till I’m 98 years old and see my great, great grand kids,” one of them told me. “I don’t want anything in between. None of us do. A warrior’s death, you can’t get any higher than that. It’s horrible for the family, they don’t want to hear that, but for us, the guys at our command, we’re okay with it. That is our duty, the highest calling. And if that happens to you, you hope you are in the right frame of mind that you are okay with it. I have seen a lot of people go, not well. Had they been able to do another take on it, they would probably want it to go better. I remember everything else about Adam also, but I will always remember the end. You know, your first impression lasts a relationship, and your last impression is with you forever. Adam died well.”

Pix

This site has an unfortunate addiction to exclamation points, but the photos are great. A sample:

Grim Fells a Tree

So this morning I felled an oak, only to have it hang up on a tree about a third of its size.  It looked pretty comfortable.  The wife said, "Hey, I've got an idea.  Why don't you....?"

Great idea, dear.

Some Views on Marriage and Family

I'm going to post three articles on marriage and the family for discussion.

First, Lars Walker has a piece on how marriage and family has changed since the Icelandic sagas. I think he's right on here,* as will not surprise you. What he's talking about here is frith and freedom, topics we have often discussed.

The central political value for the Norseman was freedom (at least for himself and his kinsmen). The defense of freedom is an issue that rises again and again in the history of the age, as an old system based on kinship and traditional law resisted a new system based on central monarchy and imported laws. And the central bastion of this freedom -- the chief counterweight to the power of the state -- was the family. The genealogies in sagas are long because the families were big. The more relatives, the more power and security a man enjoyed, and the more axes he had available to resist oppression.

Marriage was central to that system. Though a Viking woman could not (in theory, anyway) be forced into a marriage, marriages were more the alliance of two families than the union of two loving hearts....

One of the reasons Americans nowadays yell at each other so much over marriage is that we fail to understand this (or understand it and don't care). Those whose idea of marriage looks back to this old model (which is not exclusively Norse, but almost universal in the world in one variation or another) argue with people whose concept of marriage is purely private.

It's my observation that most of us on the traditional side do hear what the moderns are saying, though we disagree. But the other side doesn't hear us at all. The modern idea of marriage makes it purely a private matter. Children are an accessory, and often not an important one.

Quite right. The weakening of the family makes us less free, as individuals, because we have only ourselves and the state. Strong families not only serve as another source of support, but also allow you to counterbalance the state's intrusions into individual liberty. The family can resist as well as support.

The other two articles I won't quote at length, but I leave them here for you to consider. They are of a type: a child of one of the 'new' types of families dispassionately explains what the cost of this type of family was.

The first is "The Child's View of Single-Motherhood," by Michael Brendan Dougherty. His sympathy for his mother -- and ability to see his own flaws as a child -- makes the piece especially worth consideration.

The second one is "Growing up with Two Moms: The Untold Children's View," by Robert Oscar Lopez. He asks both that we understand why this is less than ideal for children, but also for a more sympathetic and respectful treatment from society for those who turn out "weird" because of it. That's surely a reasonable request.


* An aside on the subject of the feud, for Mr. Walker. You write:

My cousin's actions are, by extension, mine. If your cousin killed my cousin, I might just kill you, because one kinsman is pretty much as good (or bad) as another. To us, this seems ridiculous.

I don't think this is right. I've observed the blood feud at work not only in reading the sagas, and Anglo-Saxon history, but also as it is still lived today among tribal groups in Iraq. The idea isn't that one cousin is as good as another, but rather that the feud is an attempt to balance an account of honor.

Let's say that I kill someone very important in your family (perhaps your father). If I am not also very important, you may not be satisfied with killing me. Killing me won't balance the scales. So, you may go and kill my uncle -- who is a better man than me -- in order to create balance.

The problem is that different families value members of their kinship at different rates than do outsiders. I may think that your father wasn't worth half what my uncle was, even though to you it seemed to even the scale. Thus, I think I now have a blood debt to repay: and so I go and kill your cousin. But to you, this upsets the scale again, so now you feel you have a debt.

This is why the reconciliation system in all of these tribal/honor cultures follows the pattern of getting the elders together to sort out a blood price. A group of people who are respected (or sometimes, if he is respected enough, a single judge) decides where the remaining debt lies, and sets a price that both sides accept. This settles the remaining debt so that peace becomes possible.  The hard part is finding a payment -- weregild or diyya -- that both sides agree makes it even.

In other words, the system actually does make sense once you understand the mechanism at work. My killing your cousin isn't irrational, but rather a measured response based on my sense of how important the various people are within the community of honor.

Breaking Stone

I'm told we're in a drought here, but we've had so much torrential rain lately that things are washed out. I've spent the last few days trying to repair the driveway, which (as is common for rural driveways) is somewhat long. The original owner wisely built his house upon a hill surrounded by hardwood trees, with the pastures in the land below. This protects the house from the dangers of flooding, while giving the pastures the benefit of extra moisture from the runoff.

However, it also means that the driveway extends up a hill, and is prone to washing out. Someday I would like to pave it, but for now it is gravel over red clay, and (as is usually true with red clay) quite prone to having whole sections turned into ravines by a heavy storm.

Fortunately there are some spots of quartz stone on the property, which is relatively easy to quarry. So, since Friday, I've been breaking the stone out of the ground with a pick, shipping the big chunks in a wheelbarrow to the ravines, and then breaking them into small stones and gravel with an eight-pound sledgehammer.

Eight pounds doesn't sound like a lot of weight, but swung from above your head with both hands, you will often strike a stone of eighty pounds and see it burst into three or four pieces. With practice you develop an eye for the lay of the crystal structure, so that you can shear off a piece, or cause the whole to shatter into fragments. Sometimes I dig trenches and fill them with larger stones, so as to trap runoff and silt.

In any case it's hard but satisfying work. The next time someone tells me I didn't build the roads I use for commerce, I can answer: "I surely helped."

Vatican Warns of US Threat to Catholicism

So says the headline, anyway. Is that what the Vatican said? Well...

The Ryan Pick

If any of you went back and looked to see what I've written about Rep. Paul Ryan in the past, you found that the answer was "almost nothing." There's a couple of reasons for that:

1) I think his heart is in the right place, but,

2) I think his brain is in the wrong place.

I haven't wanted to be too critical of a man who wants the right things, and who was clearly fighting in the right direction, but I also don't think his famous plan begins to approach the scale of the problem we face. I think I know why, too: Rep. Ryan has spent literally his entire adult life in Congress, and so his framework for understanding the problem is the CBO math. He's clearly familiar with the CBO numbers down to the minutiae. The problem is that the CBO numbers intentionally refuse to take account of the true costs we face in terms of entitlements and Federal pensions.

Thus, Rep. Ryan's critics are right: his plan is entirely inadequate. It fixes the problem as the CBO sees it, though not for fifty years: but it doesn't begin to fix the real problem.

I would not have chosen this as the starting line for the battle we are about to wage. If we end up compromising from here, as we are likely to do given that is the political process, we will be beginning from a position that already fails to solve the problems. The NYT is already blasting Rep. Ryan's plan as Armageddon for everything good and right in America, but the truth is that plan pales by comparison to what really needs to be done.

On the other hand, as mentioned, Rep. Ryan's heart is in the right place. If he doesn't understand the scale, he does understand the stakes. When he talks about these things, he talks about saving the country. That's really what is at stake: if we don't come to a repair on these issues, the tensions will tear us apart. If we get to the crisis point without having fixed the entitlement and pension crisis, our nation will dissolve into factions over the question of who gets cut most. These will be life or death questions for everyone involved, because they will have come to be dependent upon the programs that are no longer viable.

That leads me to believe that Rep. Ryan is educable on the question of the scale. This also provides an opportunity for those who have been following this issue, like USA Today (and Mr. Steyn, whom Tex mentions below), to bring the issue to the level of the national debate.

It's a chance, which is more than we seemed likely to get out of this election. In an hour of grave danger, one must be bold in seizing on any chances that Fate sends.

Slogans

Mark Steyn favors: "It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt." He's not happy about the bland Romney campaign. I hope he'll be pleased with the choice of Ryan as running mate.

Why Are We Doing This, Again?

As the worst drought in over a half century took its toll, investors went on a buying spree, boosting corn prices by more than 50 percent from late May to fresh record highs above $8 per bushel. The U.S. government on Friday released fresh crop data that revealed shocking cuts for this year's grain and oilseed output as the drought spread through America's breadbasket.

So, the obvious response is to stop putting the stuff into gasoline, right? I mean, E10 -- that is, the gas blend that contains ten-percent-ethanol -- is incredibly destructive to small engines, and it's driving food prices up at a time when grain prices are already ruinously high. There's just no excuse for continuing our current policy.

Naturally, then, we'll be making a change in that policy.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will require all consumers to buy at least four gallons of gasoline from certain gas pumps after the new E15 ethanol-gasoline blend is introduced into the market.

Of course. I should have known that would be the solution.

The Limits of Theory

Much of the liberal arts has, for some time now, been dominated by what is sometimes called "theory" -- that is, one of several modes of interpretation that starts with several assumptions and then applies them to reality.    Several famous modes are Marxist theory, Freudian theory, and Feminist theory.  The intent is to generate insight into the mechanisms behind observed reality, but since you are assuming the mechanisms, the quality of the insight you generate is limited by the degree to which your assumptions are correct.

A glaring example Paul Strom's article "Mellyagant's Primal Scene," (available in The Norton Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, p. 894).  The whole article is an extended attempt to apply one of Freud's theories about the effect on a child of witnessing his parents engaged together to a scene in Malory's work that involves neither children nor an actual witnessing of any such engagement.  The result is pathetic. There is no reason to believe that Freud's theory is correct applied to other cultures; nor to different centuries; nor that a theory pertaining to a child can inform the reaction of an adult; nor that a theory built around the child/parent relationship should apply to cases of unrelated adults; nor that a theory about witnessing sex in progress captures the reaction of discovering some evidence of sex having happened at another time. In point of fact, there really is no evidence that Freud's theory holds even for all children living in his own time and culture. Nevertheless, the inclusion of Dr. Strom's article in the Norton Critical Edition shows how much academia is captured by this approach.  It's a masterful example of the genre, even if it generates misapprehension and misunderstanding rather than insight.

There's another good example linked by Arts & Letters Daily today in a book review by one Sara Wheeler, apparently a feminist theorist.  She is reviewing a book on penal codes related to sexuality, and relates a few examples and then her general complaint:

The supposed Enlightenment transition from religion to reason was patchy: in 1806 England hanged more sodomites than murderers, while fear of masturbation reached such a climax in Germany that men caught at it had their foreskins tied shut over their members and held fast with iron rings.

The very next paragraph begins:

What all this amounts to, in most of the human cultures that have ever existed, is the male fear of and wish to subjugate women. I would have liked Berkowitz to spell this out.

Apparently the irony of the remark was lost on her and her editors, if any.

What is also lost is the sense that the theory isn't adequate to the reality being encountered. This is not to say that codes regulating sexuality never have to do with a wish to subjugate women; but the assumption that they always or mostly do is an assumption being brought by the theory. These should stand as counterexamples to the sufficiency of the theory as a mode of understanding human sexuality. It may be that a more complex set of assumptions is needed: it may even be that the assumptions need to be revised.

Bailout Nation

President Obama wants to repeat the auto bailout: "I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry."

That's a great idea, Mr. President. Have I told you about my horses*** manufacturing business?

That idea will fit right in around here.

Socrates and De Charny on Friends and Enemies

The Arms of Geoffoi de Charny
Geoffroi de Charny was one of the greatest knights of France, a bold adventurer who features prominently in the chronicles of Froissart. He was a member of the Order of the Star, and was chosen to bear the sacred banner of France at Poitiers. He died with it in his hands.

He also composed a serious work of ethics, from the perspective of a knight trying to explain to other knights and men-at-arms the best way to live. He makes an argument about friendship, and relations with enemies, that ought to interest us.

There is a supreme rule of conduct required in these good men-at-arms as the above-mentioned men of worth inform us: they should be humble among their friends, proud and bold against their foes, tender and merciful toward those who need assistance, cruel avengers against their enemies, pleasant and amiable with all others.... Love and serve your friends, hate and harm your enemies, relax with your friends, exert yourself with all your strength against your foes. You should plan your enterprises cautiously and you should carry them out boldly.

He goes on to warn against quarrels, so we may take 'enemies' here to be enemies of the deadly serious sort. There were enough of them for any man in the Hundred Years War.

Recently we considered an argument that questioned whether it was possible to accept an account of patriotism as a virtue, given that it was not universal as many philosophers believe justice ought to be. The good doctor referred us to The Republic, which is supposed to challenge the idea of in-group loyalty. The men who lived in Athens at and after the time of the Peloponnesian War, though, also had real enemies and real friends: this audience understands the proposition. Socrates' arguments are problematic, and I'm not sure that he should be read as undermining the idea he is taken by moderns to criticize.

Socrates' first argues not that it is wrong to be more interested in helping your friends than your enemies, but it doesn't make any sense to say that justice is the art of 'helping friends and harming foes.' But Socrates has set us up, by portraying justice as a kind of skill -- techne, in the Greek. If justice were 'the skill of helping friends and harming enemies,' then Socrates' argument would be right: justice would be of little use, since the actual power to cause help or harm is always found in other skills. Justice isn't a skill, though: it's a disposition. The just man is disposed to use your skills for the help of your friends and the harm of your foes.

Socrates goes on to prove that justice is theft. Again we see the skill/disposition problem, though. It is true that the same skill is involved in knowing how to keep money from being stolen, and knowing how to steal it. Justice doesn't lie in the skill, though, but in the disposition of the man who employs the skill. The difference between the just man and the thief is how he is disposed to use the skills that he has.

Both of these objections are answered by Aristotle's system of ethics, whereby virtues are not skills but a kind of habitual response to a kind of problem. This is to say that Socrates is treating a man as having skills, of which justice is one; but Aristotle adds the layer of a man having character. There is a reason you can trust the good guard, but not the thief, even if their skills are just the same. The virtue of justice is part of the character of the one man, while the other one is vicious.

Socrates, though, has another set of arguments that are more troubling. First he asks who our friends and enemies are:

S: By friends and enemies do we mean those who are so really, or only in seeming?

P: Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks good, and to hate those whom he thinks evil.

S: Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not good seem to be so, and conversely?

P: That is true....

S: Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the unjust?

Here there is another problem, which is that the definition of justice has become circular. Justice is helping the just and harming the unjust; 'the just' are defined as those who help the just and harm the unjust; 'the unjust' are defined as those who fail to help the just and harm the unjust. So how do I know whom to help? It can't be that I pick the man who helps everyone, unless no one is unjust: for failing to harm the unjust makes him unjust, and so I have a duty to harm him.

Socrates goes on to argue that harming anyone makes him less just, and thus that the just would only help. In practical fact, of course, that isn't true; punishments sometimes do reform, or at least dissuade. But it's also a logical problem even on his own terms. Say someone goes about harming everyone. That makes those people less just. I have a duty to harm the unjust; thus, everyone who was a victim of the first person is a more legitimate target of harm from me simply by virtue of being a victim.

There is a sort-of hope that we might be able to lift people up by doing better by them than they deserve. If we always help (and if the assumption were true that helping people makes them more just), we could ratchet our way up to justice meaning helping everyone because everyone is just. Of course, in practical fact, it's not true: but again, logically, if I help someone who is unjust I am not being just according to the standard, and my choosing to be unjust damages me. I become less just (and thus more worthy of harm, by everyone) because of my act of charity.

Ultimately, then, Socrates' arguments do what Socrates loved to do -- they raise problems for you to struggle with. Socrates isn't proposing an answer, he's making you question the assumptions in the hope that you will come to a deeper understanding of the issue.

Notice, though, two things:

1) In his earlier arguments, Socrates doesn't abandon the idea of an in-group morality: we are to help our friends and harm our enemies. The question is merely whether justice helps us do this.

2) Likewise, in the later passages, there is an in-group morality: the distinction between 'the just' and 'the unjust' is still there. Unfortunately, the circularity of the definition, and the misapprehension of justice as a skill, gives rise to logical problems that confuse the discussion.

We learn more of practical worth by reading de Charny, but we learn more about how to think -- and how to avoid the traps of thought -- by reading Plato. Both things are worthy. As de Charny says:

Refrain from remonstrating with fools, for you will be wasting your time, and they will hate you for it; but remonstrate with the wise, who will like you the better for it.

Socrates was like that: he loved no man better than the one who would argue with him.

LawDog on Satwant Singh Kaleka

The LawDog Files explains a bit more about the character of this good man, and also a little about just why he was at such a disadvantage when it came time to do his duty. (H/t: D29)

One of the tenets of the Sikh religion is that adherents must carry on their person a knife, called a Kirpan. The Kirpan is a reminder that the carrier should have the courage to defend all those who are persecuted or oppressed.

In our enlightened, politically-correct times, however, this has caused some problems. The blade -- traditionally between six inches and three feet in length -- seems to be "intimidating" in the Age of the Common Man, and thus has been variously legally required to be "less than four inches", or blunted, or even sealed inside of its scabbard with glue.

I mention this because initial reports state that when Evil presented itself in his place of peace and began to slaughter those of his flock, 65-year-old Satwant Singh Kaleka did his level best to punch the ticket of the decades-younger murderer with what the Media has described as a "butter knife" -- a blunted blade, less than four inches in length.

I have long advocated -- and in Georgia, successfully -- for the extension of weapons carry laws to knives. In spite of that, it's rarely the case that a state with 'shall-issue' permits for handguns has the same approach to its knife laws.

The Sikhs have an additional problem, which is that their universal duty means that they run afoul of 'special places' laws. For example, in Georgia, it is illegal to carry a weapon, even with a permit, into "a place of worship." That law is ill-advised on its face, but it's especially terrible in the case of a Sikh temple. It criminalizes the performance of their duty in the very place most consecrated to the way of life that solemnizes the duty. Presumably the police could drop by every weekend and round up the whole congregation unless they comply with this pretense, and carry "symbolic" knives instead of real ones.

The state legislature won't be in session again until next year, but let's undertake to repair this injustice. Asking them to make do with symbols instead of the real thing is disrespectful of a highly honorable faith, and it may have cost a very good man his chance to stop an act of murder. He gave his life trying, but with the proper tool he might have succeeded.

Bounty of Summer

I spent most of today on food. In spring and early summer you lay away firewood for the next winter; in late summer you lay away food. We usually hang strings of peppers to dry, and we freeze many things, but this year I decided to try canning as well.

I made up a bit more than a gallon and a half of salsa and chipotle sauce, and canned a few stewed tomatoes and peppers as well. If the seals are good tomorrow, I'll make a bunch more.

We're also getting pears off the trees we planted for the first time this year. The trees still look like sticks after two years in the ground, but they've begun to produce.

My apple trees are still not producing, but someday! We'll have cold-pressed cider, and apple pies, and apple jelly and butter.

This is what I made the wife for dinner. It's just a garden-fresh stuffed pepper with a bunch of red chili and pico de gallo, but she thought it presented nicely and wanted you to see it.

The Fortress of Saladin

Time has a series of photos from famous castles located in Syria, near where the fighting is ongoing, including one belonging to Saladin and visited by T. E. Lawrence.

Earlier this spring, rebels based in Krak des Chevaliers descended to destroy a loyalist fortification. The kind of building where the loyalists were holed up will be familiar to any of you who went to Iraq.

Hey, Here's a Song Ya'll Know

Everybody knows George Thorogood.



But just for the record...



That's a familiar character, is it not? In fact, by now, you even know which Hank Williams that one was.

Let's Hear Some Mormon Jokes

Allahpundit writes on the new Obama campaign ad:

They won’t attack [Romney] for being Mormon (I hope), so calling him a murderer will have to do.... You know what’s really interesting about this spot? It’s not even a health-care ad. It’d be sleazy under any circumstances, but there’d at least be a concrete policy angle if Burton was selling it as an argument for, say, single-payer, to decouple insurance from employment. He’s not. There appears to be no actual policy argument here at all, unless The One now opposes layoffs on principle, for fear that someone somewhere might be left without insurance.

The policy argument doesn't need to be explicit, I think: decoupling employment from insurance is clearly going to happen under Obamacare. As Dad29 was pointing out the other day, it's clear from the way the incentives and penalties are structured that the real desire is that employers should drop coverage, putting people on the public (i.e., government run) exchanges. Otherwise, how do you make sense of the fact that dropping coverage for all employees nets you a $2,000 annual penalty, but it's a $35,600 fine per employee per year if you fail to provide free birth-control, including sterilization and abortifacients?

The complexity of the regulations and the scale of the penalties will make compliance expensive even for those without moral objections -- especially as HHS appears to believe it has been given a free hand to revise the mandated requirements at any time. You can hire lawyers and accountants to keep you in compliance, risking massive fines if you should miss something; or you can pay $2,000 total and opt out for the year.

Just a cost of doing business, that.

As for attacking Mormonism, coincidentally Adam Gopnik just finished a piece for the New Yorker on the history of Mormonism. The upshot of the piece is that Mormonism is clearly a fraud perpetrated by an unstable madman, has weird doctrines, and was imposed in Utah through extreme brutality including the massacre of a large number of innocents who had accepted safe passage from Brigham Young's riders. We learn that it was so dangerous that the US Army was called out to quell it, avoiding war only because the Mormons surrendered key doctrines of their faith.

However, the piece concludes, all is well now because the Mormons sold out. Having left off pursuit of the stranger aspects of their faith for pursuit of vast, vast wealth, they are no longer the danger to society that once they were.

'But hey!' the piece concludes: religions selling out for money is a good thing. The Mormons are role models for the rest of you, who ought to sell out your values like they did. That brings us back around to the business about the huge fines and the contraception mandate, after all.

I'd assume that the timing was coincidental, except Mr. Gopnik explains that it isn't:

It’s only later in the cycle of integration that the group comes banging on the door—as Jews and Catholics did, in the nineteen-fifties—for more general admission, not as cardboard stage-ethnic types good at one or two things but as people available to do everything, just like the ruling Wasps. That’s when everyone starts asking what it is these people really believe.

As he goes on to point out, his piece is not alone: in addition to "four scholarly books" on the history, there are a ton of "Mormon jokes" and "a Mormon-themed Broadway show" engaging the attention of New York City right now.

Now, I haven't heard any Mormon jokes. Religious jokes can be funny, if they're in the right spirit. Are they?

Money in Politics

The AJC describes the state of the race for the Georgia 9th Congressional District in an article entitled "Money frames a mountain vs. tea party race in the 9th."

The thing is, neither the mountains nor the Tea Party have much money. The recent T-SPLOST victory in Atlanta was fought by the Tea Party with a budget of around fifteen grand. Their opponents spent millions lobbying for it. When the spirit of the times is on your side, though, sometimes you don't need a lot.

The figures here are on the same scale. I don't think the money will matter, really: I'm not sure how much money really does matter in politics. Remembering the Wisconsin runoffs, it was never possible to determine just how much each side had really spent, and how much of an advantage either side had -- but the final vote totals were almost precisely the same as the vote totals from the previous election (i.e., the recall didn't change any minds; people voted the same way the second time). Likewise, we've seen unprecedented expenditures from the Obama campaign designed to demonize their opponent, but the needle on Romney hasn't moved very much. The people who were going to vote for him are still going to vote for him, and I am not sure all that many people exist who are both genuinely undecided, and interested enough to turn up on Election Day.

It may be that we have vastly overestimated the capacity of political advertising to change peoples' minds. I tend to think they vote their interests and personal values; and that's why I'll be voting for Dan Collins in the runoff. He's mountain-born, carries the endorsement of the last politician in America I truly respect, he's a former military chaplain and he spent time in Iraq. I think he'll serve with honor.

I think Zoller's a good candidate too, though; she's a firebrand and a Tea Party activist. We need all of those we can get. Even so, my sense of what I want is pretty set. I don't think they can move the needle on me with a slick ad, not even when the needle would only have to be moved a little bit. This causes me to believe that, more than we admit, people usually do what they want to do no matter how persuasive you are.

Civil War Buff Disarms Knife-Wielding Robber

So says the headline... but note that they mean the English Civil War.

Mr Thompson, a member of the Sealed Knot, grabbed the robber’s hand and dragged him over the shop counter. The grandfather wrenched the knife from the man’s hand and then pinned him to the counter while the shopkeeper dialled 999.

During the brawl, the masked robber drew a second knife – but Mr Thompson disarmed him again before pinning him to the floor and waiting for police.

Well done, Cavalier.

Against Hedonism, or, Why Happiness Does Not Equal Pleasure

Here is a good popular reading of why hedonistic ethics and politics must fail -- including modern utilitarian ethics and political thought.  You can maximize pleasure, maybe; maybe you can even structure a plan that maximizes pleasure for a group of people, given a level of resources.

What you can't do is plan to maximize happiness, because it's not that kind of a thing.  As Aristotle says, and rightly, happiness is an activity -- it is the particular activity of fully engaging your virtues in the pursuit of excellence.  As such the question 'are you happy?' does not especially relate to the question 'how many resources do you have?', beyond a lower boundary that gives you adequate nutrition, etc., to ensure that you have the physical capacity to pursue excellence.

All virtues require developing good habits and good training, but there is also a certain amount of capacity that either is or is not inborn.  By the way, the Greek word he mentions -- eudaimonia -- doesn't quite mean 'having a good guiding angel.'  A daimon is not exactly an angel:  it is a kind of spirit, one that the Greeks metaphorically said rode on  your shoulder:  that is, you couldn't see it, looking forward.  Other people could see your daimon, and could tell whether it was a good one or a bad one, but not you.

There is some wisdom in this.  We fail to be able to discern whether distant people are happy -- rich and famous people should be, shouldn't they? -- but we are often able to help people we know well to see that they are happier than they realized.  In fact, it is in relating to others that we do discover how happy we are:  what really matters is not our internal sensation of pleasure or cheerfulness, but the relationships we build with others whom we love, respect, or honor.  That is the field in which we best express our virtues, and thus the field in which we are most likely to discover how happy we can really be.

Customer Service

Two weeks ago I ordered some motorcycle parts. They were shipped on the first of August, with a note that they would arrive in one to three days. In fact they arrived today, in the following package:

I can't imagine why the Postal Service is having so much trouble with its competition.

UPDATE: ...and unsurprisingly, one of the parts -- a headlight replacement bulb -- was broken.  Beautiful.

A Workman Is Worthy of his Hire

Apparently doctors consider themselves workmen, too. Having paid for their own educations and insurance, they resent being dragooned into working below their rate.

Decker finds a positive correlation between Medicaid reimbursement rates and how many providers accept Medicare. In Wyoming and Alaska – largely rural states that pay Medicaid providers about 50 percent more than Medicare reimburses – the vast majority of providers accept Medicaid. In New Jersey – where reimbursement is the lowest – only about 30 percent say they’ll take new patients.

Why is this important? Part of the new health care law is expanding Medicaid. In states with lower reimbursement rates, however, more private doctors simply refuse to play along.

Which states would those be?

As Avik Roy pointed out a few weeks ago, states with Democratic governors actually tend to have lower reimbursement rates.

What? Why?

Faced with crunched budgets, some have chosen to cut provider payment rather than reduce services.

So, faced with crunched budgets, the states have chosen to cut the doctors' pay per Medicaid client. They are shocked to find that doctors are unwilling to accept such clients when they could work for people who pay the full rate.

This is what the death spiral looks like. Expand social welfare, and costs rise. Costs rising leads to budget cuts. Budget cuts lead to fewer doctors being willing to participate in the social welfare system. This results in political pressure on the politicians to force the doctors to participate...

...and that's surely the next step here. Expect it when you see it.

By the way, what does it mean for the health care law if the Republican states refuse to fund the exchanges, and the Democratic states can't afford to pay doctors for the Medicaid expansion?

Bearing True Faith

Temple President Satwant Singh Kaleka, killed trying to tackle and restrain yesterday's gunman. Here was one who understood the kirpan.

Curiosity

A great name for a space probe, Curiosity landed on Mars either yesterday or this morning depending on where you live.

NASA seems pleased. It looks like they got the old Babylon 5 folks to do their graphics.

The Fiscal Cliff

"The Fiscal Cliff" is what the New York Times calls what we usually call the union of Taxmageddon and Sequestration. However, it happens that the NYT is in favor of both higher taxes and massive cuts to defense programs (although it largely wants to see that spending redirected into "investments," i.e., other kinds of government spending). So where are we on this, in their reading?

Until recently, the loudest warnings about the economy have come from policy makers and economists, along with military industry executives who rely heavily on the Pentagon’s largess and who would be hurt by the government reductions.

But more diversified companies like Hubbell Inc. in Shelton, Conn., have begun to hunker down as well.

Hubbell, a maker of electrical products, has canceled several million dollars’ worth of equipment orders and delayed long-planned factory upgrades in the last few months, said Timothy H. Powers, the company’s chief executive. It has also held off hiring workers for about 100 positions that would otherwise have been filled, he said.

“The fiscal cliff is the primary driver of uncertainty, and a person in my position is going to make a decision to postpone hiring and investments,” Mr. Powers said. “We can see it in our order patterns, and customers are delaying. We don’t have to get to the edge of the cliff before the damage is done.”

So if we don't solve the problem, we get a renewed recession; if we do 'solve the problem,' it means increased deficits because we can only 'solve' it by agreeing to smaller tax cuts and redirected spending.

Seems like I've heard this story before.

On the Occasion of a Sikh Massacre

There are few religions in the world that I admire more than the Sikh faith. These are my brothers, at least in one of their most sacred concepts.

[A]ll baptised Sikhs (Khalsa) must wear a kirpan [sword or dagger] at all times....

The kirpan is both a defensive weapon and a symbol. Physically it is an instrument of "ahimsa" or non-violence. The principle of ahimsa is to actively prevent violence, not to simply stand by idly whilst violence is being done. To that end, the kirpan is a tool to be used to prevent violence from being done to a defenseless person when all other means to do so have failed.

It is a shame that none of them were able to bring the kirpan to its proper use today. Perhaps we shall learn that some of the fallen were trying. In any case, they are a fine and noble people, and I am terribly sorry for their loss.

News That Was Obvious Twenty Years Ago

Social Security? Not such a great deal after all, and it's only going to get worse.

Of Course It Would Have to be John

All US Presidents but one are cousins of King John of England. You remember King John?



The song isn't very good history, really: John not only was the first King John of England, he was the last one. The "mom" he allegedly calls for was Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is the consolation prize: if all our Presidents are related to John, they're also related to her, and to his brother, Richard the Lionheart.

Still, good history or not, the song does bear a certain similarity to current events...

Stand up

Grim's post about the Incas reminded me that I hadn't been over to "The Bleat" in a long time.  I find his little daughter has grown up considerably.  Today they're discussing a recent film expert poll that places "Vertigo" over "Citizen Kane," but the consensus of many of his readers is that "Casablanca" is better.

It's not an art film, nor subtle.  Just a perfect thing of its kind.  It's the prodigal son: "for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; was lost, and is found." This is the first scene in which the surviving spark of humanity in Rick begins to flare up again. At the same time, you see in Ilsa's face why the story can't finish up with her leaving her husband. How many passionate love stories end with the lovers deciding to part rather than do wrong, and yet without painting them as tragic figures beaten down by their restrictive culture?



Notice how the tune of "Die Wacht am Rhein" meshes harmonically with "The Marseillaise," so that the conflict doesn't just sound like Charles Ives noise. Music, courage, and love. The Nazis banging away on the piano like robots are Jewish actors who had recently escaped Europe.

What Were You Expecting?

The London Olympics, 2012.

Stonehenge, Midsummer Day, since time immemorial.

Louis Armstrong and the Power of Art

Bthun sends a tale by Charles L. Black, Jr., on the magic of Louis Armstrong.

[O]ne never entirely knows the ways of the power of art. I know a little of the framework, a little of the rational components. But when these are exhausted, art remains inexhaustible, unknowable....

He was the first genius I had ever seen. That may be a structurable part of the process that led me to the Brown case. The moment of first being, and knowing oneself to be, in the presence of genius, is a solemn moment; it is perhaps the moment of final and indelible perception of man’s utter transcendence of all else created. It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.... [G]enius—fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever? It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man. You don’t get over that.

I remarked to Bthun that I thought Dr. Black was remarkable to be able to make the adjustment. Think of how many people who have first encountered genius in a Jew, and remained as anti-Semitic as ever they were. Worse, perhaps, since they now had cause to fear as well as to despise the object of their hatred.

Dr. Black sounds like he never really despised anyone, and the recognition thus could work its magic. The power of art is something we often discuss here, but art is also like a mustard seed. It seeks the fertile ground.

Here is the recording Dr. Black mentions. You can judge for yourself how well he judged it.



By the way, Bthun noted that today is Louis Armstrong's birthday. It is, in fact, his eleventy-first -- to borrow a phrase from another artist who has done a world of good.

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!"