Joseph Schumpeter Is Looking At You, Atrios

For those of you who may have followed our recent debate on economics all the way to the end, here is a Ph.D. in economics whose plan to save retirement is to raise Social Security benefits, while taxing existing retirement savings in 401ks. There's kind of an interesting logic here.

First, the problem:

Let me be alarmist for a moment, because the fact is the numbers are truly alarming. We should be worried that large numbers of people nearing retirement will be unable to keep their homes or continue to pay their rent.

So obviously the solution is that government must give these people enough money that this does not happen. However:

There are good proposals out there for improving the private aspect of our retirement system.... [b]ut none of these ideas will help people who are nearing retirement. Only the possibility of several decades of compound returns make the personal financing of retirement a realistic idea for most people....

Even if we do find ways to improve the framework for self-funding retirement, how, exactly, do we expect younger workers, who might benefit from these improvements, to start saving significantly for their retirement? Soaring tuition and fees at universities, combined with the associated soaring student loan borrowing, have led many people to start their working lives already deeply in debt.

So, we have a huge government benefit, Social Security, that -- in spite of being one of the largest expenditures of the United States already -- isn't capable of meeting the minimum standard that Dr. Black would set for it (i.e., no one loses their home). The solution is to increase spending by 20%. However, no one can pay for this spending! The about-to-retire can't do it because they already don't have enough money. The not-quite-about-to-retire need to be saving like bandits to avoid being in this trap themselves. And the young can't do it because the cost of a college education is through the roof, and so they are starting their lives in a hole. They'll have to work twice as hard to get out of the hole, and then have to save for this burden we call retirement.

Now, Social Security is a kind of generational insurance program (or, if you like, Ponzi scheme). The idea is that the current retirees draw benefits paid for by younger generations, in return for the promise (or, if you like, forlorn hope) that similar benefits will be paid to them in their turn.

We have just learned that this program fails the current generation about to retire, but increases cannot be supported by the next generation in line, nor the younger generation either.

I would take this as an argument that Social Security has failed, and needs to be replaced. Dr. Black takes it for an argument for its expansion.

This is why our system is dying. Black isn't a bad guy. He has charitable interests at heart. He's very well educated, and even in the subject matter under discussion. Joseph Schumpeter was exactly right about him.


(A further critique is here.)

Bettis Rifles

In the War of the Rebellion, better but erroneously known as the Civil War, Confederate forces famously had less access to industrial goods. This is one reason that Confederate model firearms often feature brass where Union ones use steel, creating a highly attractive design out of what was really a necessity.

In addition, though, they could tap local gunsmiths who had long been supplying local hunters and farmers with hand-made rifles. The local newspaper where I grew up has a story about one such individual in the paper this week.

According to Bettis, his ancestor’s production operation likely was the first manufacturing facility in the county, although a far cry from what modern Americans think of when they hear the term.

The process consisted of just Bettis, a forge, handheld tools and perhaps some of his five children helping him.... Bettis rifles always also feature a silver sight, created from a coin cut in half.

I have a hand-made musket from around this period that belonged to my great-great grandfather. It's from the highlands of Appalachia, big-bore and smooth barrel. It's a percussion cap like these, but sadly it did not come to me in as well-preserved a condition.

Cuteness-Recognizing is Predatory Behavior

For a while now, I've had a theory that cross-species emotional bonds somehow relates to predatory instincts in mammals. We bond with cats, dogs, and horses. Of the three, cats and dogs are predators; horses really aren't, but over our thousands of years together they have begun to be able to learn to actualize predatory behavior. A cutting horse, for example, is doing something that is more properly predatory than would be natural to a wild horse. It may be that in training them to think like a predator, we've been teaching them to relate emotionally across species.

Popular Science has a story about "Why do we want to squeeze cute things?" that demonstrates something like a predatory connection to cuteness:

But for the sake of thoroughness, researchers did a second experiment to test whether the aggression was simply verbal, or whether people really did want to act out in response to wide-eyed kittens and cherubic babies. Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted.

When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively.

(H/t: InstaPundit.)

Now they posit a couple of theories about this that point in other directions. Still, I think I'm right: there is something about the kind of mind you need as a mammalian predator, as a predator who hunts by thought rather than by pure instinct, that gives rise to this.

Consider further anecdotal evidence:





Now why is that, I wonder? But I think it is.

So What?

The New York Times reports that boys get worse grades exclusively because teachers are prejudiced against troublemakers.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

I suppose one could make an argument that there's a problem here. Teachers of primary and secondary schools are almost exclusively female, after all; perhaps there's some sexist preference for well-comported girls over unruly boys. However, my guess would be that male teachers mostly like well-behaved students also.

Rather, we have a kind of sorting going on whereby people who are good at sitting still and learning to speak (and think) in an approved way go into certain kinds of jobs, and people who are uncomfortable with that find other ways to make a living. In terms of the long-term happiness of everyone involved, that's a good thing.

It happens to be true that one class of such jobs pays better than the other class, but that's an artifact of the present moment. As the article itself points out, it didn't used to be true: and as technology continues to change, more and more options open up for people who just aren't very well adjusted to the 'sit-still, be-quiet, watch-what-you-say' environment that predominates in the schoolhouse and the New Model Office. It's a pretty oppressive and unpleasant environment, as unpleasant as any factory to those who chafe at it.

So yes: boys are more unruly. It's very important to try to teach them to obey the rules and show respect. But on the final analysis, their happiness as adults doesn't depend on learning to sit down and only say things considered polite. It depends more on them finding a way of life that comports with who they are. The economy won't stay like it is forever, and the office won't be the dominant mode of economic life forever.

Besides, if you're really unruly you can go into politics. We need a whole new political class anyway.

Personality Is Destiny

All of you know my opinion of psychology, and thus must be girding yourselves up for the mockery I am likely to bestow on this article by Penelope Trunk on the subject of qualities to look for in a woman if you want to have children.  (Via Instapundit:  it's actually the follow-up to an article she wrote for women seeking husbands for the same purpose.)

Indeed I might be so inclined, since she so readily divides up humanity into nifty categories and tells them -- based on the results of a pen-and-paper test you might take in a few minutes -- the possible ways in which they can structure their lives if they don't want divorce and failure.  If psychology could really do this, they would deserve the massive consulting fees that they con out of corporations who want so much to believe they can do it.

(You can imagine how nice it would be for them if people were so easy to categorize.  Think of how nice it would be never to hire someone who proved not to be right for the job!  "Mr. Smith, it has come to my attention that you hired someone other than an ENTJ for an executive track position.  I might have let it go if they were at least a close ESTJ, but this person is an 'I'!  I'm afraid you'll have to clean out your desk -- and that's the last time I hire a 'perceiver' instead of a 'judger' for human resources.")

However, I'm going to go easy on her and discuss her opinion on the four types of wives to avoid.

Women who are most likely to be tortured that they are not climbing the ladder: ENFJ.

Women who are most likely to change their mind and not want to go back to work after the baby: ISFJ.

Women most likely to be disappointed that there is so little combined earning power in this arrangement: ESFP.

Women who are most likely to be dissatisfied in life no matter what choices they make: INFP.

Two things really strike me as interesting about this list. They are both people who, if you take the model seriously, are doomed by their biology.

The first is the ENFJ, the "women most likely to be tortured that they are not climbing the ladder." Yet we learn here and in the earlier article that this personality type is doomed not to be able to climb the ladder successfully. All the top executives are ENTJs, with a handful of ESTJs. "Sometimes an ENFJ slips in, but they are tortured and don’t last. The F kills them. They feel bad that they are not fulfilling their duty as parents. It’s not peer pressure, it’s internal pressure. It’s how an ENFJ is wired." This is described in terms of personality type, but it appears in both places targeted at women particularly. They will hate climbing the ladder because they aren't right for it, but they'll be tortured if they don't try.

Similarly, the INFP: "Women who are most likely to be dissatisfied in life no matter what choices they make." I assume these are the women who keep writing the "Why can't women have it all?" articles.

Anyway, apparently these two types of women are screwed. No matter what they do, they're going to be miserable. Best to avoid them if you're wife-hunting!


(Fair play: I've been exposed to this test several times, and I come out at the very border of INTJ and INTP -- usually around a 1% preference on the P/J split. The only thing the article says about me is that, insofar as I can be a "J," I'm in the second-most-likely-to-be-a-high-earner category. I'd have thought other factors were more important, like intelligence or education, but apparently personality is what it all comes down to. INTPs don't get mentioned in either article.)

Glorious junk

I understand there was a Mongolian herder once, a century or two ago, who was less interested in football than myself, but otherwise I think I take the crown.  Still, that doesn't mean that I don't take the food rituals associated with Superbowl Sunday very seriously indeed.  On the way home from church, I picked up a dozen frozen, uncooked eggrolls from the Vietnamese shrimp market, then braved the completely insane HEB for every kind of frivolous foodstuffs I could think of:  chicken wings, salted nuts, chips, makings for chili-cheese dip and onion dip, and a key lime pie.  We're going to fix the wings with Woody's Cook-in Sauce doctored with some vinegar and pepper.  Then we'll fry up the eggrolls and serve them with lettuce, shredded carrots and daikon radish, cilantro, and mint.  We may even have guests over.

If you've never tried Woody's, you're missing out.  It can be got by mail order via Amazon if your store doesn't carry it.  Can't beat it for a fast treatment for beef or chicken that's going on the grill or under the broiler.  It's not a sauce for dipping but for roasting:  not at all sweet.

Blunt those knives or someone may get hurt

Leon Panetta complains that the "political knives" are out to discredit Chuck Hagel as nominee for Secretary of Defense.  He would prefer the hearing to have focused on what Mr. Hagel thinks about issues he may face in his new post, instead of getting bogged down in what Mr. Hagel has said about foreign policy in the past.  For instance, his interrogators spent time on his statements in a 2009 Al Jazeera interview (I'm queasy already) that the U.S. was "the world's bully," as well as opposition to crack down on state sponsors of terrorism, his advocacy of negotiations without sanctions with Iran and terrorist groups, and his description of Israel’s 2006 military campaign against Lebanon (provoked by the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers) as “sickening slaughter.”  And standing up to the Jewish lobby, and so on.

I suppose there were other hot topics Mr. Hagel might have been examined on, but once his audience learned that he was going to disavow all his prior statements, why would they be interested in his new, spontaneous, unverifiable opinions now that he's facing a confirmation battle?  Who listens to someone who claims he's undergone an eve-of-confirmation conversion?  "Some of my Senate colleagues," wrote Ted Cruz, "may be satisfied that the pledges he has made in recent days are more meaningful than his policy record compiled over the past fifteen years.  I am not."  That's the problem with disavowing yourself:  if your audience is paying attention, they quit listening to anything new you might want to say.   You may as well cut out your own tongue.

Even Salon, which dismisses the problem as a Tea Party attack, wishes Hagel had upped his game to Clintonian levels:

Although the Texas freshman’s hit man performance was laughable, it must be said that Hagel seemed poorly prepared for his predictably rough handling.  His inability to offer the shrill Lindsey Graham a single person or policy that might have been overly influenced or intimidated by “the Israel lobby,” in his controversial words, made him look dodgy.  He might have presented a defense of his opposition to the 2007 Iraq surge when pushed by an ornery John McCain, but he didn’t. 

I understand that he couldn’t be outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, hitting silly Republicans with her best shots and having a hell of a good time doing it.  But he lost Republican votes anyway even with his non-confrontational performance, and he left an overall impression of being not quite ready for the spotlight.  That doesn’t mean he’s not ready for the job, but his enemies will frame it that way.

It does seem unfair, doesn't it, to expect the nation's top diplomat to be ready for the spotlight, or to keep his story straight on issues of foreign policy.  But not even Carl Levin could bail him out of his spectacular faceplant on our policy regarding Iran:

Hagel also stumbled in replying to a question on Iran by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R–GA):  “I support the President’s strong position on containment, as I have said.”  Later, though, he was passed a note from an aide and offered a correction:  “I misspoke and said I supported the President’s position on containment.  If I said that, I meant to say we don’t have a position on containment.”  Senator Carl Levin (D–MI) corrected him, saying, “We do have a position on containment, and that is we do not favor containment.”  Levin added: “I just wanted to clarify the clarify.”

Well, that's diplomatic.

The First Americans

Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this very interesting interactive map and timeline of human worldwide migration as suggested by mitochondrial DNA evidence.  Most of it was what I'd generally gathered from reading over the years, but there were two discontinuities that were new to me.  First, the Mt. Toba volcanic catastrophe of about 74,000 years ago cut off a lot of people who had managed to migrate east through South Asia to Indonesia.  After that, they radiated into Southeast Asia and Australia, but also back the way they came, all the way to Europe, reversing the direction of the pre-Toba migration.

Second, the East Asians made it up to the Bering Strait and crossed into North America between 25,000 and 22,000 years ago, including a significant group that arrived on the mid-Atlantic coast.  Between 22,000 and 15,000 years ago, however, an ice age wiped out nearly all settlements and movement north of the 55th Parallel, cutting off the New World from Asia.  When things warmed up, there was a whole new migration from Asia, this time mostly hugging the west coast of the Americas and spreading all the way down into the southern hemisphere.  In the meantime, the old settlements on the mid-Atlantic coast also spread down into South America, but mostly hugging the east coast.

I thought of the map today because of a Maggie's Farm link to a Smithsonian article about the long-simmering debate over whether the Clovis culture represented the first arrival of people in North America about 13,500 years ago.  The "science was settled" for quite some time, but more recent archaeology has led many to open their minds to the possibility of pre-Clovis cultures.  There may have been two major migrations, widely separated in time and geography.

Hey, That's Funny, Because Usually Only States Have 'Regulations' Against Murder...

“In providing mail service across the country, the Postal Service attempts to work within local and state laws and regulations, when feasible,” wrote Breslin, after reminding “To Whom It May Concern” that postal workers promptly deliver over 200 billion pieces of mail annually.

“However, as you are probably aware, the Postal Service enjoys federal immunity from state and local regulation,” she continued.

Police State (part 42)

Instapundit points to this item out of New York. An application of the new gun control law just recently passed. 

Keep telling yourself it's not a police state. 

The wages of consent

Grim has been arguing with me lately about how wages work, what they reflect, and how they should be set.  We even discussed the possibility of selling freedom, in effect:  commanding a higher or more secure wage by bartering away long-term freedom, as in an indenture.  These proposals, like thought experiments about selling organs, were mostly ways to explore why neither of us could tolerate the idea.

It occurs to me now that we were missing something that's not merely a thought experiment or even a cautionary tale, but a real live, functioning economic system:



A welfare state threatens to become a system in which the most valuable service some voters can offer the market is to elect a politician who will drain resources from those who didn't elect him.  The politician pays for this service by routing a fraction of the loot back to his loyal voters.  The welfare state differs from our earliest attempts at state-administered charity in that the politician no longer is commandeering and redistributing only a small fraction of the nation's wealth to a small number of the most desperately needy.  Now he's commandeering from 49% of voters and redistributing to 51%.  Once the politician realizes that that's the path to staying in office (where he makes a handy living by skimming off the top of the redistributed funds), we are well on our way back to a command economy, one in which a centralized power directs where most of the resources shall be routed.  That way lies poverty for everyone.

How do we stop a pernicious system of votes for hire?  Honestly, I don't know.  On my darkest days I think the franchise should be weighted by the amount of taxes one pays.  Obviously that system would create its own problems.  I'm tempted to say that, once the wheels come off the cart in this particularly way, it can't be fixed.  And yet many countries that suffered behind the Iron Curtain have turned their kleptocracies around and begun to increase their prosperity again, so it's clearly not impossible.  Is it like drunks, who have to hit a hard, hard, rock bottom before change can come?

Well, That May In Some Sense Be True, But...

Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responds to criticism on Benghazi.

There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable.

Yeah, funny thing about that: some of us would really like to base our criticism on Benghazi on solid evidence. For example, an investigation that was actually allowed access to the site would have been very desirable.

How about declassifying relevant documents so we can criticize you based on the evidence? Apparently Congress isn't up to the task, and most of the media hasn't exactly pulled out the stops either. For example, this interview appeared not to involve a great deal of pressure on her claims here. 'Secretary Clinton, let me ask you about Benghazi.' 'Well, my opponents are a regrettable and disappointing lot who don't know what they're talking about.' 'I see, thank you. We'll rush that right to press!'

Illumination

Mr. Mom

Ann Althouse links to last week's WSJ article about the different parenting style of a stay-at-home dad: less process, more results.  Less empathy and sharing, more self-control and perseverance.  I liked this Althouse commenter's impression of Dad's first question to Junior in the morning:

"You wanna beer?" 

"It's 7 o'clock in the morning!" 

". . . Scotch?"

Strategery

From the comments to a RedState article about immigration:

My question is why did the GOP pick up the amnesty flag at all?  This was a priority? 

The GOP "reasoning" seems to be this . . . 

Budget, nah, can't be bothered. 

Exploding Deficit, just doesn't seem important. 

Runaway Government both in size and power grab, not really worth addressing. 

Amnesty, that’s the ticket, it wrecks the budget, explodes the deficit, increases the runaway government and best of all it peeves our base!  One other benefit, it increases the Democrats base.  Wow, why didn't we think of this before!

Tax relief

No comparison of Perry's brains to those of Ted Cruz should be taken as a criticism.  Perry stumbles now and then, and he may not be the world's most articulate spokesman of conservative principles under fire, but his instincts are often right on target.  One of his newest initiatives is a website to collect comments on the best way to refund $1.8 billion dollars of what is now a $12 billion Texas state budget surplus.  (The rest will remain in the state's rainy-day fund.)

Sticker shock

As my husband noted in forwarding this link to me, the first step in controlling costs is finding out what they are.  Employees of large companies are just now receiving their first W-2's revealing the cost of the health-benefit portion of their compensation.

Voter suppression

I don't find this argument persuasive.  David Fredoso, author of “Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Reelect Barack Obama,” maintains that Chris Matthews engaged in a voter-suppression campaign by calling Republicans racist.  However stupid or partisan Matthews's remarks may have been, I think we go off the rails if we equate unfair or irrational criticism of political parties with voter suppression.  Is Matthews supposed to have scared potentially conservative voters away from the polls by lying about the Republican leadership?  Persuading voters away from the polls is not the same as bullying them, even if the persuasion is mistaken or dishonest.  Would we be in patience with liberal complaints that Republicans suppress votes by criticizing the incumbent Democratic president?

There can be only one

AVI offers a more tasteful look at race relations than MSNBC.

Don't you hate hate?

MSNBC network contributor and former DNC communications director Karen Finney deplores the tone in the immigration debate:

Even Republicans in the Republican Party who were Latino [were] just disgusted with the tone.  Those crazy crackers on the right — if they start with their very hateful language — that is going to kill them . . . .

Die Like A Man

A post from the new site Helen's Page explores how cancer is like America:

On January 16, my father and I learned that he has terminal cancer. He's eighty-four. Yesterday I discovered that he's known about his soft-tissue pelvic sarcoma for almost two years but did nothing about it. My father is terrified of cancer, so he denied that he had it. He pretended it didn't exist.... My father has lived in a state of blissful denial his entire life. He used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and until he was seventy he drank a quart of scotch a day. His diet consists of steak, salami, potatoes, bread, cheese, mayonnaise, ice cream, and pie....

He told me recently that until he was eighty, he honestly thought he'd live forever. I didn't say, "Really? You thought you'd live in your house here in Los Angeles for trillions and trillions and trillions of years, making your wooden toys, watching Bill O'Reilly... for all eternity?"...

My father's mother died of heart disease and diabetes. She screamed and cried and begged God for more time, over a three-week period. It was very traumatic for my father. My grandmother was seventy-eight and had never once changed her diet after her diagnosis of diabetes. She gorged on cookies, cake, and pie and then screamed for more life. Her death was unfair, she cried.

The other day I was cutting down a tree with my chainsaw, and I took a moment before making the final cut to prepare for death. It's not a difficult process. I said the usual prayer, accepted that in a moment I might be dead, and then felled the tree. Sure enough it didn't fall just as I wanted.  Nevertheless, as I took the alternate escape route, I experienced no fear.  Perhaps this is because my studies in metaphysics have led me to believe that death is a small thing; perhaps it is simply because I am practiced in facing death.  Aristotle held that any human virtue was likely to be the result of good practice.

You know you're going to die. It could be today. The good life ideally includes a good death. Why not practice for the great challenge you know is going to come?

Your Kitty, Like Your Host...

OK, sure. They're cold-blooded killers. But so are we. Farming is nothing but killing once you've planted the seeds. Ants, voles, field mice, crows, invasive species, they're all the enemy of the one particular thing you wanted to grow.

Nature doesn't care, but kitty does. So do we. It's why we have them. The dogs are to ride herd on them because unlike dogs, cats can't be trusted.

Come on down

Ted Cruz applies a market approach to Second Amendment freedoms, in light of Chicago Mayor Emmanuel's attempt to bully banks into refusing to loan to gun manufacturers.  To the banks, he suggests moving to Texas, where they can loan to anyone they like.  To the gun manufacturers, he suggests moving to Texas, where we have lots of banks who would be happy to lend to them.  To the Mayor, he notes that the city recently wasted over $1 million in legal fees in an unsuccessful assault on the Second Amendment.

Regardless, directing your attacks at legitimate gun manufacturers undermines the Second Amendment rights of millions of Texans.  In the future, I would ask that you might keep your efforts to diminish the Bill of Rights north of the Red River.

I'm going to like this guy:  Rick Perry with twice the brains.  I really can't say how tickled I am that he replaced Kay Bailey Hutchison.

My head hurts

Over at Ace, Monty sums up beautifully what's confusing about an extraordinary piece of babble from the CNBC website:

See, here's the problem:  A spending limit isn't a limit unless it actually functions as a bar to further spending.

The CNBC piece struggles hard to reconcile a lot of contradictory ideas.  For example, Obama promised the sequester wouldn't happen, but the article's author notes with some surprise that it turns out absolutely nothing has been done so far to avert it.  That's because of "entrenched politics in Washington."   (We know who those entrenchers are.)   "Many" thought that the recent Republican agreement to delay the effective date of the debt ceiling signaled a willingness by Republicans to "co-operate" with the White House, but now it seems that Republicans think spending cuts are a good idea.   (Who knew?)

Republicans would rather see the spending cuts take a different form, but if the sequester is the only form on offer, they'll live with it.  Democrats would rather avoid the spending cuts altogether, but they kind of like them, because they spare Medicare and Social Security, so they're not motivated to negotiate, unless the Republicans offer to raise taxes on the wealthy.   (Wait.  Didn't Republicans just agree to do that?)  Republicans don't want to raise taxes on the wealthy again, a negotiation position that apparently has taken the Democrats completely by surprise.

So both sides are more or less content to let the sequester take effect, given the alternatives.  But the spending cuts may slow growth, especially since Congress just increased payroll taxes.   (The article can't figure out to which party to attribute that change, so it stays fuzzy.)  And now that Democrats think about it, they don't like the non-defense spending cuts in the sequester.

I've lost the thread of what Democratic negotiators in Congress are trying to achieve.  I know they want to avoid slowing the economy.  They see spending cuts as slowing the economy; they may even see tax hikes as slowing the economy.  They sometimes express an interest in reducing the deficit, which surely requires either cutting spending, raising taxes, or expanding the economy.  Is the idea that you can expand the economy by raising taxes as long as you tax only the rich?  In other words, the higher taxes on the rich will shrink the deficit as long as they don't slow the economy too much?   I understand the notion that it's fair to tax the rich more, without agreeing with it, but I don't understand the notion that it will not slow the economy.  It sure isn't working in Europe, or California.  We can concentrate on not slowing the economy by avoiding either tax hikes or spending cuts, but then we're ballooning the deficit.  Eventually, that will lead either to runaway inflation or to a drying up of the national credit.

No matter how many times we play this shell game, how is there ever any real alternative to living within our means?

I hope that the debt-ceiling deal will lead to a budget from Congress by the agreed deadline.  It's got to be less irrational to try to negotiate spending cuts within the context of a specific budget than to negotiate with people who say, "If I can't spend as much as I'd like on absolutely everything, I'm not going to pay any bills at all."

It's a wonder people don't like lawyers

This kind of story is just sad, I think:

A unanimous panel of [a New York State appellate court] yesterday affirmed the dismissal of a $77 million wrongful termination suit against Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman brought by an ex-associate, Gregory Berry.  Berry worked in the software industry for 15 years before going to the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  After graduating in 2010, he was hired by Kasowitz, but was fired after less than a year. 

According to his suit, Berry took the job because he was told that Kasowitz gave associates a high degree of freedom and responsibility.  However, he said those representations proved false, and he was fired for asking for more responsibility in an email in which he wrote, among other things, that "after working here for several months now it has become clear that I have as much experience and ability as an associate many years my senior, as much skill writing, and a superior legal mind to most I have met."

The way this kind of negotiation is supposed to work is that an associate of unusual ability or background gently reminds the powers-that-be that he is a valuable member of the team who can remain happy only if he is granted the kind of freedom and responsibility he'd been led to expect.   If he doesn't get it, he may have to start listening more carefully to the many offers he is getting from other firms, though he hopes they can remain friends even if he leaves.   It's a pretty delicate conversation to have with people who need to like you at least a little bit if they're going to continue working with you 16 hours a day.  "I have a superior legal mind" is not a charming approach.  Letting that email be published on the Net is almost as bad as a really awful Facebook picture.

And although I'd be the last to disparage the ability of an exceptional lawyer to earn exceptional pay, I have to laugh out loud at the idea of $77 million in damages, or at his unhappiness with $27,000 in severance, especially after he agreed to take it.

Just Random Bad Luck

An article making the rounds considers the case of a Chicago mother whose four children have all been killed in what the article describes as "gun violence." The latest "child" to die was 34 years of age, and had -- the article does not mention this, so you have to scroll to the comments -- a history of some 29 arrests, and gang membership. There is some confusion about whether he was a former or a current member of the Gangster Disciples when he died. The drive-by nature of the shooting suggests gang violence, but no one has been arrested.

The article is similarly circumspect about the other shootings. The first is described as a shooting by "a high-school classmate" "after an argument." The others are just described as having been close together in time.

If only Chicago had some more gun control laws, I guess we are meant to take from the article, this kind of thing would not happen.

Real or fake? Does it matter?

Mark Steyn nails it, as usual:

[T]he secretary of state denied that she’d ever seen the late Ambassador Stevens’s cables about the deteriorating security situation in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” – and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. . . . 

When a foreign head of state receives the credentials of the senior emissary of the United States, he might carelessly assume that the chap surely has a line of communication back to the government he represents.  For six centuries or so, this has been the minimal requirement for functioning inter-state relations.  But Secretary Clinton has just testified that, in the government of the most powerful nation on earth, there is no reliable means by which a serving ambassador can report to the cabinet minister responsible for foreign policy.  And nobody cares:  What difference does it make? . . . 

Nor was the late Christopher Stevens any old ambassador, but rather Secretary Clinton’s close personal friend “Chris.”  It was all “Chris” this, “Chris” that when Secretary Clinton and President Obama delivered their maudlin eulogies over the flag-draped coffin of their “friend.”  Gosh, you’d think if they were on such intimate terms, “Chris” might have had Hillary’s e-mail address, but apparently not.  He was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends cabling the State Department every hour of the day.

Celebrate Diversity of Religion

Some comments on the Right reacting to this piece are improper.



Says Ed Morrissey: "But to 'thank God for abortion' demonstrates a lack of proper formation in religion … or just a bit of demagoguery intended to put on a fake faith to assume speakership for that contingent of people. If Touré really believes in God, perhaps he should take the time to find out what God says about pretty much the entire arc of behavior that Touré admits in this brief clip[.]" But what the man is saying is that he thanks his god that he was able to kill the child he didn't want so he could have a better life (including the child he eventually did want). There is a long American tradition of religion that advocates for the sacrifice of the unwanted in return for a better life.

How unfair to assume that he was speaking of the Christian God -- or that a claim like this refers to "a fake faith." Something ancient is being worshiped here, though the speaker may not have been taught to recognize his god by its right name.

Revolutions

An interesting article at Cafe Hayek explores the transformational value of human inventions.  What is more revolutionary, indoor plumbing or the Internet?  The commenters muse about living on the cusp on an age in which knowledge is shared worldwide in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago.  Not so far back in my life, I couldn't have guessed what conversations I'd be having daily with people all over the world.

You keep using that word "sacrifice" . . . .

Bookworm Room leaps into the socialized medicine fray again, with a post called "When It Comes to End-of-Life Decisions, the State Does Not Love You."  She's reacting to a revolting piece at Slate arguing that it makes sense to "sacrifice" the life of an infant to save its mother.  Whether or not that trade-off makes sense, The Anchoress points out that it doesn't constitute a "sacrifice."  A sacrifice is one person giving up something valuable for another.  Despite the euphemism employed by medical researchers who "sacrifice" an experimental laboratory animal, the killing of an infant to save the mother is not a sacrifice.  It is a killing that may or may not be justified by harrowing circumstances.  If the infant killed itself to save its mother, that would be a sacrifice.  If the mother died so that her baby could be born, that would be a sacrifice.

This is part and parcel of the confusion I so often complain about, that leads us to describe as "charity" the act of taking someone else's money and putting it to good use.  The confiscation of property may lead to many good things, such as justice, mercy, or efficiency, but it is not charity.  Charity is when one man gives of his own property to help someone else in need.

The Bookworm post is well worth reading in its entirety, not just for this point about euphemisms and the mental confusion they generate, but for its treatment of euthanasia, and the broader problem of who will make the best choices about scarce medical resources.  She describes a time when she believed a beneficent state would make better choices about expensive end-of-life care than money-grubbing family members.  She failed to take into account the inevitable shrinking of prosperity and resources under a socialist system, and the need to compare apples to apples:  the question is not whether a flush socialist state will be more merciful than a cash-strapped family, but whether, in cash-strapped situations, the most mercy will be found in people who know and love the patient, or in bureaucrats who are total strangers.

No system of economics or government eliminates the problem of making hard choices about limited resources.  Some systems create more prosperity than others, but we will always bump up against the wall of what can be done for one problem without robbing resources available to solve another.  The question is:  what system solves the conflicts in a way we can live with?

Tourist maps

I like the "mountains in the other direction!"

H/t Bookworm Room.

Women in combat

I find this account incredibly persuasive even though every fiber of my being wants to argue against it.

A British Son of Liberty

In the comments to a recent post at BLACKFIVE, a gentleman posted a link to a song by a British singer that references the Sons of Liberty. The only name he mentions in the song is Watt Tyler, though, so he's reaching a lot further back than the famous Sons -- 1381, in fact.



Musically it isn't much of a song, but the lyrics are encouraging.

House of Eratosthenes

Some good stuff on House of Eratosthenes this morning.  On Hillary Clinton's strange testimony this week:

We have our Secretary of State . . . reminding us that the whole point is to find out what happened, and therefore “what does it matter” . . . what the h--- happened.  Sheer nonsense.

And on the weird treatment of science in political disputes:

But it bears repeating, science has nothing to do at all with what we “must” do.  Science is all about what is.  One steps outside of the domain of science, usually slamming the door behind him, and forgetting the key, the minute one starts pondering the thing-to-do.  With the climate change deal, a lot of people tend to forget that. 

[I]n classical times “science” was used to describe a process, and in more recent times it is used to describe an orthodoxy of institutionalized beliefs, and a coterie of elites maintaining them. 

. . . 

Time after time, I see lefties “proving” that they deserve to be the one Alpha Dog of the pack — and not taking the trouble to prove much of anything else.  They start babbling pure nonsense.  Like “It’s our job to find out what happened here so it never happens again, and what difference does it make who did this thing we’re trying to prevent from ever happening again, or why they did it.”  Arguing about security procedures and climate science . . . the way Arctic wolves would, if they could talk.

Maybe we have a Constitution after all

A federal appeals court has found that when the Constitution says the President can make recess appointments, that means he actually has to wait until a recess to do it.  He can't just act during what feels like a recess to him, on the ground that the appointment is really important and Republicans aren't being nice to him.

Conan, Master of Arts

A helpful article from McSweeny's medical journal entitled, "FAQ: The 'Snake Fight' Portion of Your Thesis Defense."

Q: Do I have to kill the snake?
A: University guidelines state that you have to “defeat” the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window.

Q: Does everyone fight the same snake?
A: No. You will fight one of the many snakes that are kept on campus by the facilities department.

Q: Are the snakes big?
A: We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the smaller the snake will be.

...

Q: So then couldn’t you just fight a snake in lieu of actually writing a thesis?
A: Technically, yes. But in that case the snake would be very big. Very big, indeed.

Oh, so that's what happened.

Guns and budgets

From Instapundit, quoting a friend:

If Republicans want to stop gun control legislation in the US Senate all they have to do is attach a budget to it and Harry Reid will ensure it never comes up for a vote.

Harbingers

Paul A. Rahe addresses a question about whether there is a non-Marxist literature on what occasions revolutions (he misses Hannah Arendt). Are there leading indicators that suggest a revolution may be coming?

One key indicator is that those with access to the levers of power within the ruling order cease to believe in the religion or ideology that legitimizes the regime. Another is that their underlings also gradually abandon the beliefs that render respectable the rule of their masters.

For some reason, he goes on to talk about China.

Mourning at the Morning of the World

There is much to mourn at this hour. We watch the nation fall ever farther from the moral life that formed it, and informed it at its darkest hours.

Since I am quoting Dunsany, though, it is worth remembering that he was an ally of the ancient things. The ancient things renew.

THE RETURN OF SONG

"The swans are singing again," said to one another the gods. And
looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and
far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger
than a star shine beautifully but faintly, and up and up from it looking
larger and larger came a flock of white, innumerable swans, singing
and singing and singing, till it seemed as though even the gods were
wild ships swimming in music.

"What is it?" I said to one that was humble among the gods.

"Only a world has ended," he said to me, "and the swans are coming
back to the gods returning the gift of song."

"A whole world dead!" I said.

"Dead," said he that was humble among the gods. "The worlds are
not for ever; only song is immortal."

"Look! Look!" he said. "There will be a new one soon."

And I looked and saw the larks, going down from the gods.

"The Assignation"

A very short story by Lord Dunsany, one of the greats of his age.

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.

And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.

And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.

And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: "Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by."

And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:

"I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years."

But read on, for "Charon," and the story of the Sphinx and Time.

The communal fire

Last night we tried something so obviously wonderful that now I can't understand why we haven't been doing it all our lives.  We brought home a bag of unshucked oysters, had a bunch of neighbors over, and spent the evening around a fire pit grilling the oysters, shucking them, and eating them with a variety of condiments my husband whipped up yesterday morning.  (The lime-chili-cilantro sauce has to be tried to be believed.)

The oysters came fresh from the local bay.  Unshucked, they cost a small fraction of what we're used to:  $30 buys a 100-lb bag (more than 300 oysters), while a gallon of shucked oysters (perhaps 100) is fetching $54 these days.  Shucking is a breeze when the oyster has been grilled.  When the shell pops open a fraction, you know the oyster is done.

The free-standing metal fire pit, a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law, is a welcome addition to our patio.  Besides providing a fine focus for a friendly outdoor party at this pleasant time of year, it let us burn up some deadfall wood and produce ashes that we'll use in the garden.  And of course we had s'mores.

Lime Chili Cilantro Sauce

6 large garlic cloves, minced
3 TB fresh cilantro, minced
4 green onions, minced
1/3 cup Asian chili paste
2 TB sugar
1/2 tsp lime zest, minced
1/3 cup lime juice, freshly squeezed
1/3 cup Vietnamese fish sauce
1-1/2 TB pickled ginger, minced

If you're starting with raw shucked oysters, you can spoon this sauce over them before grilling, and you can add the reserved oyster liquor to the sauce.  For grilling in the shells, we just cooked and opened the oysters, then let the guests spoon a little sauce over the top.  It's good on all kinds of things, not just oysters.  Its explosive flavor is a crowd pleaser.

A Delightful Interlude

If you are among the people who occasionally receive presents from me, do not follow these links because you'll ruin some upcoming surprises.

For the rest of you, is this not perfect?

I like this one, too. Also this one.

And one for Eric Blair.

Another Perspective on Violence and Guns

It's injudiciously phrased, so take that as a warning, but consider this article.

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities... with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.

He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average....

In 2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally buying a gun is all but impossible.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

You've probably read about the latest report on the dangers of right-wing terrorism to come out of the US Federal Government, in this case the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the disclaimer on the report, which states that the opinions are the author's only, and not those of the government, the DOD, etc. Fair enough!

That said, The Atlantic would like you to know that the report shows that there is a rising scale of domestic right-wing terrorism. They highlight the report's findings that "in the 1990s the average number of attacks per year was 70.1, the average number of attacks per year in the first 11 years of the twenty-first century was 307.5, a rise of more than 400%."

OK, again, fair enough. Apparently there is a rising tide of violence from right wing groups. However, I have a question about the composition of the groups described as violent.

Two of the three divisions the author proposes aren't very controversial. He mentions racist groups such as the KKK, and "Christian Identity" groups such as the Aryan Nations. These two divisions seem to be responsible for the rising tide of violence.

But then there is a third division in the report, a so-called "anti-federalist" movement. Here's the description of them.

Violence derived from the modern anti-federalist movement appeared in full force only in the early to mid-1990s and is interested in undermining the influence, legitimacy and effective sovereignty of the federal government and its proxy organizations. The anti-federalist rationale is multifaceted, and includes the beliefs that the American political system and its proxies were hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a “New World Order” (NWO) in which the United States will be absorbed into the United Nations or another version of global government. They also espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.

Now that sounds to me like he's talking about Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators, and indeed it turns out that he begins the main part of his report by talking about McVeigh.

However, it seems strange to bring this up as if it were a living movement. If we're talking about the 'violence derived from the anti-federalist movement only appearing in the early-to-mid 1990s,' then we are talking about the period when the violence from such groups was minimal and statistically insignificant. More than that, we're saying that this minimal, statistically insignificant period of violence represents the high point of violence from this group.

Now, on the other hand, since 2010 there has been a very loud, viable anti-federalist movement called the TEA Party. But it doesn't advocate the violent overthrow of anything. It doesn't direct violence toward law enforcement, or anyone else. It doesn't go on about any 'New World Order.' It does, however, "espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights [and] support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government."

In other words, insofar as you want to talk about the KKK and racist skinheads, there's no problem. If those groups are increasingly violent and dangerous, we can talk about how to address that problem.

If you want to use this report to paint the loudest and most effective political opposition to the President and Democratic Senate as terrorists, however, people are right to be disturbed. It is not at all clear to me that it is appropriate to suggest that there is anything like an "anti-federalist" movement that embraces both the TEA Party and the late and un-lamented Timothy McVeigh. I think, in fact, it is a dangerous sort of slander, at a time when the government is asserting "anti-terrorist" powers that are undefined and subject to no clear limits.

Two from Brandywine Books

Lars Walker tells the story of being robbed at gunpoint as a young man.

Phil provides a link to an interesting disquisition on the order of the intellectual life. It occurs to me that you can replace 'intellectual life' with 'military life' or almost any other sort of life and find that the same four points hold.

1. Recognize the Intellectual Life as a Calling.
2. Submit Your Intellectual Pursuits to Truth.
3. Understand the Intellectual Life Requires Considerable Discipline.
4. Remember the Goal of the Intellectual Life is Virtuous Character.

Something to consider!

Why Southern Democrats Are So Few

"...and long before I was born, my grandfather used this little Smith & Wesson here..."



Used it to do what, you may wonder? The ad strangely omits that part.

Here’s the problem: The CSGV has done some selective editing in its video. In its version of the ad, Barrow displays a pistol and says:

“Long before I was born, my grandfather used this little Smith & Wesson here….”

It cuts the Augusta congressman off there. How did Barrow finish the sentence in the original, and what did the CSGV choose to omit? This:

”…to help stop a lynching.”

Around here, those five additional words make a big difference.

Not just around here, I hope. This is a major part of the reason why something like our Second Amendment is so important to a just society.

Congressman Barrow was targeted because, as a Democrat, he was thought to be vulnerable. "Shame on you," the ad ends, though it seems to me the shame belongs to someone else. Here is a man who comes from an honorable tradition, who values his ancestors and the arms they bore in the defense of the innocent. The shame belongs to those who do not understand the value of such things. I don't know what they are, but I know that whoever made this ad is not fit to speak the language of honor.

So, Just To Get This Straight...

...It's plainly wrong for local law enforcement to try to help enforce Federal immigration law...

...but it is obviously mandatory for local law enforcement to try to help enforce Federal gun control law.

That makes sense, right?

Slavery and Guns

The assertion that opposition to the President is racist has been repeated so often, in so many forms, that it has become something of a joke on the Right. The older and more dangerous claim is that traditional American culture is inherently racist, in need of elimination (or at least 'fundamental transformation') because of the evil at its root.

So it must be no surprise to see this story asserting that the whole point of the Second Amendment was slave control. The intent of the argument is to suggest that the Second Amendment has evil bred in its bones, the sort of thing a decent society would thrust out.

The problem is, of course, that militias were desired and used for many reasons other than slave control -- indeed, non-slave states used them too. They were used to guard and respond against insurgencies, to repel and deter raids by Native Americans (a purpose also currently thought illegitimate by many, but highly understandable if you remember the women and children the militiamen hoped to protect), and for police purposes in an era when formal police forces were rare or expensive. They were used here in Georgia to deter Spanish incursions (as well as to make incursions on Spanish Florida). They were used as organizing institutions for the community, helping it to cohere and build a common culture from immigrants on a frontier. They were used as the backbone of Colonial resistance to British authority, and their officers provided the Colonial army with much of its early leadership.

In other words, it is very far from true that the Second Amendment owes its existence to slavery. Of course there is also a problem with reducing the Second Amendment to the militia: there is an individual right protected, as well as the state's interest in having a militia. Even taking that as an assumption, though, the argument is weak.

This Should Be An Interesting 'Clarification'

Apparently an important component of today's gun control efforts is going to be getting doctors to quiz you about guns.

Doctors and other health care providers also need to be able to ask about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms, especially if their patients show signs of certain mental illnesses or if they have a young child or mentally ill family member at home. Some have incorrectly claimed that language in the Affordable Care Act prohibits doctors from asking their patients about guns and gun safety. Medical groups also continue to fight against state laws attempting to ban doctors from asking these questions. The Administration will issue guidance clarifying that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit or otherwise regulate communication between doctors and patients, including about firearms.

Funny thing about that 'clarification' -- it appears to mean denying that the law says what it very plainly says. Here's the text.

‘‘(c) PROTECTION OF SECOND AMENDMENT GUN RIGHTS.—
‘‘(1) WELLNESS AND PREVENTION PROGRAMS.—A wellness
and health promotion activity implemented under subsection
(a)(1)(D) may not require the disclosure or collection of any
information relating to—
‘‘(A) the presence or storage of a lawfully-possessed
firearm or ammunition in the residence or on the property
of an individual; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use, possession, or storage of a firearm
or ammunition by an individual.
‘‘(2) LIMITATION ON DATA COLLECTION.—None of the
authorities provided to the Secretary under the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act or an amendment made by that
Act shall be construed to authorize or may be used for the
collection of any information relating to—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition;
‘‘(B) the lawful use of a firearm or ammunition; or
‘‘(C) the lawful storage of a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(3) LIMITATION ON DATABASES OR DATA BANKS.—None of
the authorities provided to the Secretary under the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act or an amendment made
by that Act shall be construed to authorize or may be used
to maintain records of individual ownership or possession of
a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(4) LIMITATION ON DETERMINATION OF PREMIUM RATES OR
ELIGIBILITY FOR HEALTH INSURANCE.—A premium rate may not
be increased, health insurance coverage may not be denied,
and a discount, rebate, or reward offered for participation in
a wellness program may not be reduced or withheld under
any health benefit plan issued pursuant to or in accordance
with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or an
amendment made by that Act on the basis of, or on reliance
upon—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use or storage of a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(5) LIMITATION ON DATA COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS FOR
INDIVIDUALS.—No individual shall be required to disclose any
information under any data collection activity authorized under
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or an amendment
made by that Act relating to—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use, possession, or storage of a firearm
or ammunition.’’.

I suppose that leaves some room to ask if you have unlawfully possessed guns, or stored them in an unlawful manner.

The mental health provisions are the ones that concern me, though. The fact is that there is no lab test for any mental illness -- you can't do a biopsy and prove that someone has a personality disorder the way you can prove they have cancer. By the same token, you can't prove that you don't have a mental disorder.

Subjecting any civil right to a limitation based on an untestable condition is a very dangerous idea. It's not for no reason that psychology was so often misused by Communist governments as a means of marginalizing (or imprisoning, or lobotomizing) regime opponents -- once you are painted as mentally ill, you can never prove your innocence.

Our normal standard is that you shouldn't have to prove your innocence, of course, but rather that the state should have to prove your guilt. Well, it cannot do that here. If restrictions are to be based on mental health, then, they must not depend on proof of guilt. They can only depend on allegations of guilt. Having to prove your innocence is too high a standard even in criminal matters, when it may sometimes be possible. It is far worse here, where such proof of innocence is actually impossible.

Speaking of the South & Politics...

...the Georgia General Assembly is back in session. This looks like an interesting term, because the legislature can only meet for forty days a year, but they may not know what they need to know about the Federal budget within those forty days. Thus, there's a chance they may take a recess of as much as three weeks while waiting on Congress to decide what it is going to do about Sequestration.

In the meanwhile, here's a brief on what the session is likely to include:

State Representative Ed Rynders (R-Albany) says some of the biggest issues that are up for discussion are ethics reform and a right to bear arms.

“I believe in a right to bear arms,” said Ed Rynders, State Representative.

Although gun control is expected to come up during the legislative session, Rynders says the biggest topic is the state's budget.

“Everyone here is committed to not raising the taxes, which of course means that we have to live within our means. The governor has asked for a three percent across the board cut in programs and departments everywhere except for education. Public education will not be cut,” said Ed Rynders.

That's the kind of prioritization that the Federal government is refusing to consider. You can keep taxes low and still have one priority that you won't cut, or a few priorities that get cut less. It is possible to do this through the democratic process. States do it, but then again, states can't print their own money. Maybe the most important priority for the Federal government is a balanced budget amendment, to keep them from doing what states aren't permitted to do.

The South in the Last Days of the Republic

There's been a lot of ink spilled just lately on the South in the Obama era. I'm disinclined to respond to it, mostly, because I think the frame is wrong.

For one thing it's wrongheaded to call the South "Neo-Confederate," and would be even if it were actually attempting secession over limited-governmenet principles. Nobody in the South intends to restore the Old Confederacy, especially on racial or slavery matters. The South retains most of its complaints as defiantly today as in 1875, but not those. On those points its heart has changed.

For another, conservatism has done very well at the state level -- and not just in the South. Conservatives are doing great things at the state level even in frozen Northern regions like Michigan and Wisconsin. It's only the Federal government that has turned solidly against conservatives, and really that makes a kind of sense. Conservatism is opposed to what the Federal government has come to represent: an ever-growing, all-encompassing force with the power to regulate all aspects of life via the state. Conservatives believe in institutions that shape and guide life, including the state but only in a limited form. A state that is too strong ends up interfering with other institutions that are at least as important: the family, the church, the bonds of individual friendship, and freely-chosen organizations such as professional organizations and private clubs.

The Federal game is still a game of patronage: elect me, and I'll vote to send power and wealth your way! Naturally conservatives are doing badly given that they want nothing to do with the game; naturally what remains of the allegedly-conservative party are trying to limit the influence of their actual voters. That's an old sport, and it's a blood sport, but the power and wealth are running out. When the Federal government falls, a fate rapidly being brought about by what have become its ordinary modes of operation, it will be conservative states that remain strong enough economically and politically to survive. Whatever the new order looks like, it will be built on that strength.

So I'm not inclined to respond to the frame. However, I did want to draw attention to two things from the debate that I particularly liked. The first is that the New Yorker piece did something I rarely see done: it took a moment to appreciate what benefits the nation has gotten out of having Southerners within it.

[T]he Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and nascar, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C. (despite its largesse). In 1978, the Dallas Cowboys laid claim to the title of “America’s team”—something the San Francisco 49ers never would have attempted.... That same year, the tax revolt began, in California....

At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on.

One of the Southern voices cited by that piece responded to it, and that is the second piece I wanted to cite.

I encourage you to remember these words: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

With that in mind, I have reached out to Mr. Packer. Many of my friends hoped I would excoriate him – not only for his misrepresentation of my work, but also for the overall tone and content of his column. Others suggested that an insult from The New Yorker constitutes a compliment. And still others pointed out that any attention is good attention. (I’ve raised toddlers; I find it hard to agree with that one.)

Instead, I chose to apologize for any failings of my own that may have led him to his incorrect assumptions. I also offered to buy him some good ol’ fashioned Southern cuisine should he ever venture down this way. I sincerely hope he does.

In The Three Musketeers, Athos responds to a generous proposition by saying, "Thus spoke and acted the gallant knights of the time of Charlemagne, in whom every cavalier ought to seek his model." Likewise do I appreciate a noble and gentlemanly gesture, given that the author of the original piece made that rare effort to understand and not only to criticize.

Athos goes on to say, "Unfortunately, we do not live in the times of the great emperor, we live in the times of the cardinal." In a similar way we are unfortunate. Still it is good to hear noble words spoken, and to see a man carry himself like a gentleman.

No Government Believes in Democracy

An open letter from the UK protests the American invocation of how interested we think we are in having the UK remain in the EU. There's a tremendous irony in the United States lecturing the UK on the need to maintain a political union its people no longer find acceptable, of course, but the author lets that pass. He's after a more serious point about democracy:

The President of the United States is considered by many to be the leader of the free world, and the United States itself considered to be a beacon of democracy. So it is profoundly disappointing to see the United States administration endorsing and encouraging something that is fundamentally undemocratic. I would like to ask you the following questions.

* Would it be acceptable to you and your fellow United States citizens that over 70% of the laws and regulations they were forced to comply with across all 50 states were created by a supranational government comprising layers of complex political and judicial structures, mostly unelected and unaccountable, and made up of delegates from not only the US, but Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru?
* Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and members of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were routinely handed diktats from the various bodies that make up the supranational government and were bound by law to implement the directives or be fined or dragged into a supranational court operating an alien form of judicial code and process? Further, that Congress was denied the ability to draft, and the President sign into law, other legislation of national interest whenever the supranational decided it was not appropriate?
* Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and the Justices of the Supreme Court that decisions made by the bench, the highest court in your land, could be appealed to a supranational court overseas with the hearing presided over by foreign judges and if overruled the Supreme Court would have to accept that as a binding ruling?

If these scenarios do not sound very democratic or judicious to you and your fellow Americans it is because they are not.... No one who believes in democracy – people power – would endorse and encourage a continuation of this anti-democratic situation for the United Kingdom.

The problem is that the author has just made a criticism of the EU that is just as valid a critique against the UK itself, viewed from the perspective of Scotland's independence movement. Indeed, it is just as valid a critique against the United States government. There is simply no possibility that such a criticism, however valid, can be entertained by the political class of either nation.

The only difference between the EU and the US in the first point is the question of whether the super-sized government is 'alien' or not. Measured in the most obvious way for a democracy, that is by the values that the people hold dear and want to see protected and furthered, the complaint may be no better. Probably the people of Belize, a former British colony, have at least as many common values with the people of the UK than the people of Alabama do with the delegates from California (whose people include some conservatives, but whose government no longer does). The Federal government here also generates a massive percentage of regulation via bureaucracy rather than democratic processes. These bureaucracies are staffed by people never elected to make law, who lack any actual Constitutional authority to make law, and who are only in a small percentage of cases vetted by elected representatives.

The same is true for judicial fiat. Is it acceptable to have laws settled upon by the state legislature, approved by state courts, overturned by the Supreme Court in direct defiance of the ordinary values of the people? It has become usual. When the Supreme Court set aside the laws of thirteen states in Lawrence v. Texas, the Bush administration said that they considered the issue a state matter. Linda Greenhouse replied that the SCOTUS had said otherwise: what had been a state matter was now a matter of "binding national constitutional principle." Yet this was only the latest occasion when the SCOTUS had taken a matter where states had legislated according to the traditional morality of their people, and pronounced the issue was one on which the democratic process could not be trusted. It has likewise removed the power from Congress to legislate on issues very traditionally ordered by law, and is considering whether to do so again in the Defense of Marriage Act. We find that more and more issues are matters of "binding national constitutional principle" from which no dissent from democratic organs is tolerated.

This is not democracy. The invention of "binding constitutional principles" by the court is the repudiation of the method by which such principles were meant to arise: that is, following rather than preceding the development of constitutional consensus. A new Constitutional principle was supposed to follow the process described in Article V of the US Constitution, whereby a supermajority of support from the states would be required. That was the democratic ideal: that we would alter the fundamental bargain governing American life only when the vast majority of Americans agreed it was wise and proper. Instead the Federal government has learned to pretend that the bargain always was whatever it now wants the bargain to be. We are told that we simply misunderstood the bargain when we ratified it, and perhaps for two hundred years after.

There's nothing magical about a "national" as opposed to a "super-national" government that gives the national government a better claim to legitimacy. Legitimacy was supposed to arise from adherence to the Constitution, whose limits and forms were meant to ensure that the government remained within the bounds of the powers actually delegated to it. The EU and the US are no longer different forms of government at all. The citizen of the United Kingdom who works to move her nation out of the EU is acting wisely, and in the defense of what remains of her democracy. But she can expect no support from the 'leader of the free world.' Our political class has learned to hate the ideal she advocates.

Non-fiction

Some months ago I posted skeptically about the idea of requiring schoolkids to spend 50% of their time reading bureaucratic white papers of the "Chicken production and transportation issues in Willamette County" variety.  Maggie's Farm linked to an American Thinker article today that does the idea more justice.  Although I have real doubts how the program would be carried out in actual schools, the notion started by David Coleman is to introduce students to evidence-based argument using texts like de Toqueville's Democracy in America.  As he puts it:

It is rare in a working environment that someone says, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

Not that I'm crazy about the idea of all students aiming for jobs in which they have to churn out market analyses, but the same principle applies to a request for an analysis of any proposal or policy.  Why do you believe this is true?  And come up with something more powerful than the more-or-less grownup equivalent of "all the cool kids think it."  It's the rare corporation or government bureau -- or any other human endeavor -- that couldn't use more of that skill.

The author of the American Thinker article does have a funny approach to categorizing writing as fiction or non-fiction, though.  This is a list of what he describes as the proposed "fiction standards":

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; Thomas Paine's Common Sense; The Declaration of Independence; Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"; Allen Paulo's Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences; Mark Fischetti's Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control; and George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

I'm listening to a series of lectures about Winston Churchill.  He was an indifferent student who hated Greek and classics.  In some dismay and contempt, his father sent him off to a kind of military or administrative professional school, where he was given practical works to study; he loved them and excelled.  Without being at all in the "special snowflake" school of thought, I do believe that the task of education is to develop the different strengths of different students.  Especially as they get older, students should be offered a wide variety of higher-level materials that will challenge whatever their talents happen to be.  There will be some who can be nourished by Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control in a way they never could have been by War and Peace.

Heh:

President Barack Obama was “totally furious” he spent a week of his time posing for a trillion-dollar platinum coin that would never be minted, a White House source confirmed today....

Mr. Obama devoted much of last week to posing for the trillion-dollar coin on the assurances of outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who told Mr. Obama that the coin had “a way better than fifty percent chance” of being minted.

Based on Mr. Geithner’s advice, Mr. Obama carved hours out of his schedule to pose for the ill-fated coin, even cutting short meetings with world leaders such as Afghan President Hamid Karzai....

When Mr. Geithner delivered the news to the President that the coin idea had been scrapped, according to the source, “to say that things got ugly would be a massive understatement.”

That's one of the most perfect satires I've ever read.

Risk

From Maggie's Farm, a link to an interview with Fred deLuca, who started the first Subway sandwich shop in 1965 with a $1,000 loan from a college professor who was also a family friend.  Almost half a century later, they still share the profits 50/50 -- no quarrels, no lawsuits.

DeLuca says he was lucky when he started to be so young that he didn't really understand the danger of failure.  His first intended franchisee had a more typically grown-up attitude:

"When we first began franchising, I knew we needed a first franchisee, and the only person I could think of was [our good friend] Brian.  So I went to him and said, 'I’ve got this opportunity for you.'  He gave a practical response, which was, 'Even though I’m not crazy about [my job], I get paid every week.'  He didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk of quitting. 

"Then one day he showed up for work and his employer had gone bankrupt.  So he called me and said, 'Hey, is that offer still available?'  That’s how we got started.

Walk the Plank

Here's a theory about Republican re-orientation that sounds really exciting: Peggy Noonan says "It's pirate time."

Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren't supposed to be, and that is interesting. Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon.

That sounds great. Throw out the rules, grab a blade, and start swinging. And what does she go on to suggest that these wild swashbucklers do?

Endorse gun control, tax increases on the very rich, and "immigration reform."

Apparently when Republican Pirates yell "Surrender!" they are to precede the exclamation with "I."

Condolences to FPS Russia

Our condolences to FPS Russia on the apparent murder of their producer. I had not realized that they were close physical neighbors to the Hall, but they are apparently located quite close by (and not at all in Russia, as you might think).

Here is their top five list, in memory of the good work they have done.

Fluidity and locusts

Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons in 1936.  He quoted the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was opposing direct efforts to prevent Germany's remilitarization:

"We are always reviewing the position."  Everything, he assured us, is entirely fluid.  I am sure that that is true.  Anyone can see what the position is.  The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind.  So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.  So we go on preparing more months and years -- precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain -- for the locusts to eat.

Justified

Happiness, a new season. This is a good trailer:

Two on Tolkien

Richard Fernandez writes a review of the new Hobbit movie, which makes me think I might ought to go see it after all. I hated Jackson's treatment of LoTR very much -- well, the first movie, which I hated so badly I didn't see the others. The MTV swinging-cameras and technicality seemed to me to do violence to Tolkien's vision. I can't imagine he wouldn't have hated the movies at least as much as I do.

Still, Fernandez mentions a couple of Jackson's additions to the plot kindly. That's another thing of which I was suspicious. I can't imagine that Jackson's ideas about what the plot should contain are so superior to Tolkien's that the expansion is a great idea. Usually a novel benefits from cutting, not expanding, extra elements.

A man much more after my own heart, Lars Walker, writes the second piece for today on the subject. He looks back at older editions of LoTR that meant a great deal to him. Now this is the kind of thing that Tolkien would have understood!