They're right. We ought to savor it, and not just because good news out of Washington is rare these days. We ought to savor it because it was a bad law that deserved to be rejected on the merits, and it was. We ought to savor the success of citizen activism, in the form of the NRA and GOA and all the smaller, state-level gun rights groups.
It doesn't happen often enough, but when it does, it sure is nice to see.
The Difference Between Marriage and an Ethical Society of Friendship
As we watch the final collapse of the political opposition to the idea of something like "gay marriage," it might be worth reviewing why the idea seems so difficult to oppose on rational grounds. The reason is that we have failed to recall what marriage is for, and why society has a duty to support it.
In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Aristotle talks about a kind of ethical society based on friendship. He envisions an arrangement that looks very much like this thing we have started to call "gay marriage" -- it is an ideally-permanent union of two (or more, but usually only two) people, for the purpose of each other's happiness (happiness here is eudaimonia, the rational pursuit of virtue), involving all property held in common. He assumes the two people will usually be men.
There's nothing wrong with such a union. In fact, if it is done on Aristotle's grounds, it's quite right -- and need not include any sort of sexual element, homo- or otherwise. Much of our inability to formulate a rational rejection of 'gay marriage' comes from the fact that the form they are asking for is unobjectionable.
What is objectionable is the error of conflating it with matrimony, which is a wholly different institution with a wholly different purpose. The purpose of the ethical society is the happiness of the two people who create it. The purpose of matrimony is not principally about the two people who form it at all, and is certainly not about their happiness. Matrimony is principally about the creation of a blood tie between two families, so as to provide resources that sustain and educate the next generation.
The reason society has a duty to support marriage, and the families it forms, is that society depends on its function. Society will die if a certain number of men and women don't form marriage-based families, creating and educating their young to assume social roles as adults. This traditional recognition is why marriage involves all the attendant forms of support that it does: for example, the idea that your spouse and children ought to have access to your medical plans at work, or the idea that society owes a duty to support a widow(er) and/or orphans of a working spouse.
We lost the ball when we stopped treating marriage itself according to its own norms, and allowed it to evolve in to a sort-of ethical society of friendship. We can see this in the kind of writing that people do about marriages: you should marry if it will "make you happy," the most important person in the marriage is your spouse (whose happiness should be valued above the children, because after all the children will grow up and leave someday), divorce should be available whenever a couple would be happier divorced than married. All of this makes sense if what we are calling "marriage" isn't traditional marriage at all, but a kind of ethical society based on friendship.
It's easy to see how the error was made. Even Aristotle himself talks about cases in which a man is friends with his wife. The unity of property has already occurred in marriage, and the bond is permanent, so why not try to be friends too? There is no good reason why not, and indeed many excellent reasons to do so. The only concern is that you don't forget that the marriage has a different purpose than the friendship, so that the duties arising from marriage persist even if (for whatever reason) your friendship ends. Especially in cases when the blood union of the marriage has been realized in children, the duty to support the unity of your families persists even if you come to hate each other. It can only be rightly broken in cases of severe violation of the duties of the union by one spouse -- traditionally adultery and physical abuse. Even then, the duties survive the dissolution of the union: this is what lies behind our legal institutions of alimony and child support. The violator must continue to answer to his or her duties, even if the spouse can no longer be rightly asked to live with such a person.
Ethical societies need to be considered separately, and if 'the ship has sailed' on treating them differently from marriages, then we must rebuild marriage and family under another name. We must then also strip what we are now calling "marriage" of its social support, because it is unjust for society to be asked to support a union that is only about the happiness of the two people united. There is nothing wrong, and much right, with such a union: but society has no interest in it. You have no right to demand of your employer that he should support your friend. You have no right to demand it of your fellow citizens as tax-payers.
It would be better, of course, if we can make the old distinction stick. I wonder if we can. American society has grown selfish and self-centered, and I wonder how many Americans are still capable of accepting any permanent duty to anything besides their own happiness. If that ship has sailed, none of this current debate will matter. We who survive will be rebuilding the old order from the ashes.
In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Aristotle talks about a kind of ethical society based on friendship. He envisions an arrangement that looks very much like this thing we have started to call "gay marriage" -- it is an ideally-permanent union of two (or more, but usually only two) people, for the purpose of each other's happiness (happiness here is eudaimonia, the rational pursuit of virtue), involving all property held in common. He assumes the two people will usually be men.
There's nothing wrong with such a union. In fact, if it is done on Aristotle's grounds, it's quite right -- and need not include any sort of sexual element, homo- or otherwise. Much of our inability to formulate a rational rejection of 'gay marriage' comes from the fact that the form they are asking for is unobjectionable.
What is objectionable is the error of conflating it with matrimony, which is a wholly different institution with a wholly different purpose. The purpose of the ethical society is the happiness of the two people who create it. The purpose of matrimony is not principally about the two people who form it at all, and is certainly not about their happiness. Matrimony is principally about the creation of a blood tie between two families, so as to provide resources that sustain and educate the next generation.
The reason society has a duty to support marriage, and the families it forms, is that society depends on its function. Society will die if a certain number of men and women don't form marriage-based families, creating and educating their young to assume social roles as adults. This traditional recognition is why marriage involves all the attendant forms of support that it does: for example, the idea that your spouse and children ought to have access to your medical plans at work, or the idea that society owes a duty to support a widow(er) and/or orphans of a working spouse.
We lost the ball when we stopped treating marriage itself according to its own norms, and allowed it to evolve in to a sort-of ethical society of friendship. We can see this in the kind of writing that people do about marriages: you should marry if it will "make you happy," the most important person in the marriage is your spouse (whose happiness should be valued above the children, because after all the children will grow up and leave someday), divorce should be available whenever a couple would be happier divorced than married. All of this makes sense if what we are calling "marriage" isn't traditional marriage at all, but a kind of ethical society based on friendship.
It's easy to see how the error was made. Even Aristotle himself talks about cases in which a man is friends with his wife. The unity of property has already occurred in marriage, and the bond is permanent, so why not try to be friends too? There is no good reason why not, and indeed many excellent reasons to do so. The only concern is that you don't forget that the marriage has a different purpose than the friendship, so that the duties arising from marriage persist even if (for whatever reason) your friendship ends. Especially in cases when the blood union of the marriage has been realized in children, the duty to support the unity of your families persists even if you come to hate each other. It can only be rightly broken in cases of severe violation of the duties of the union by one spouse -- traditionally adultery and physical abuse. Even then, the duties survive the dissolution of the union: this is what lies behind our legal institutions of alimony and child support. The violator must continue to answer to his or her duties, even if the spouse can no longer be rightly asked to live with such a person.
Ethical societies need to be considered separately, and if 'the ship has sailed' on treating them differently from marriages, then we must rebuild marriage and family under another name. We must then also strip what we are now calling "marriage" of its social support, because it is unjust for society to be asked to support a union that is only about the happiness of the two people united. There is nothing wrong, and much right, with such a union: but society has no interest in it. You have no right to demand of your employer that he should support your friend. You have no right to demand it of your fellow citizens as tax-payers.
It would be better, of course, if we can make the old distinction stick. I wonder if we can. American society has grown selfish and self-centered, and I wonder how many Americans are still capable of accepting any permanent duty to anything besides their own happiness. If that ship has sailed, none of this current debate will matter. We who survive will be rebuilding the old order from the ashes.
The Wealth Tax
It's not enough to tax income anymore: in Europe, they're ready to take the next step. If you had money deposited in a bank in Cyprus, some of it just got taken away.
Well, it doesn't matter. Governments are entitled to take whatever they need, of course.
If less concerned about political correctness, one could say that what just happened was daylight robbery from savers to banks and the status quo. These same people may be even more shocked to learn that today's Cypriot "resolution" is merely the first of many such coercive interventions into personal wealth, first in Europe, and then everywhere else.The attendant graphics suggest that "most" European countries will only need to take 11 to 30 percent private investments to stabilize themselves. Only a few will need more than that percentage of their citizens' private savings.
Well, it doesn't matter. Governments are entitled to take whatever they need, of course.
Hailstone Mountain
Our comrade Lars Walker has a new book out, as you may not know if you don't get over to his place as often as you ought.
Elsewhere he offers an Irish song from the Clancy Brothers he particularly likes, as his St. Patrick's Day offering. It's a fine piece, but you'll get a lot more of that here. No reason to stop with only one such song!
Why, here's one now.
'Where Bacchus is sporting with Venus,' he says. Now that reminds me of another good song, this one in Latin.
Hailstone Mountain is an H. Rider Haggard-esque story, in which Erling is struck by a curse that could kill him slowly. In order to break the curse, he must sail north (along with Father Ailill, Lemming, and others) to confront the source of the magic face to face. Meanwhile, Lemming’s niece Freydis is kidnapped by her relatives from up in Halogaland, and it’s not a nice kind of family, so she must be rescued. And that sets off repercussions that could destroy the whole country. Erling must join forces with a bitter enemy to stave off a monstrous horror.H. Rider Haggard was always a favorite of mine. I have his collected novels just a few feet away, in fact.
Elsewhere he offers an Irish song from the Clancy Brothers he particularly likes, as his St. Patrick's Day offering. It's a fine piece, but you'll get a lot more of that here. No reason to stop with only one such song!
Why, here's one now.
'Where Bacchus is sporting with Venus,' he says. Now that reminds me of another good song, this one in Latin.
I Sense a Sarcastic Disturbance in the Force
I haven't seen the series, but it has generated at least one review worthy of the time it takes to read it.
No critical love. No marketing oomph. No-name cast. Together equal — what else? — ratings smash!Obviously.
Probably just coincidence, but the same kind of paradox confounded Hollywood some years ago, as it pondered the improbable success of another biblical movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” Of course, that international blockbuster had movie icon Mel Gibson. Not on screen, no. But it did land Jim Caviezel for the lead role. CAVIEZEL. That’s C-A-V …
And once Jim Caviezel was attached to star, it was practically inevitable that “The Passion of the Christ” would go on to become the all-time top-grossing R-rated movie in the U.S., and rake in over $600 million worldwide. As if. No, here again, we must admit, answers are elusive.
Now and then a right-wing critic will come out of the woodwork to fantasize about some imaginary silent majority of viewers hungry for inspiring, all-ages popular entertainment. But if there was some vast, under-served market for bible stories, then, obviously, Hollywood would be producing them.
Why is it?
First off, I'd like to start by begging Grim's forgiveness and indulgence. I'm now FAR afield from why he granted me permission to post to his Hall in the first place. A gracious host, he, and I am loathe to abuse that trust.
But I've been thinking (a dangerous prospect in the best of times); why is it that the media, and most especially the non-Catholic media, feels it is qualified to determine what the head of the Roman Catholic Church should or should not support as Church doctrine? I suppose a lot of it is human nature. We want people to believe as we do, and the choosing of a new Pope IS international news, so they feel they should comment on it. By why is it that it seems to be Popes who get this scrutiny?
I can't even name the current Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church from memory, and I have no idea when was the last time they chose a new Patriarch. But I CAN say, I don't recall any hand wringing about "will the new Patriarch support gay marriage?" Likewise, I do not know who is the current Shia Grand Ayatollah. The last one I recall was Ayatollah Khomeini, and he's been dead for decades. Did anyone question the new Grand Ayatollah's stance on contraception? No? I can't recall any such discussion. The current Dali Lama? Anyone know his name? His position on euthanasia? I suppose I could look all this up, but it's actually irrelevant. I know Pope Francis I's stance on gay marriage, contraception, and euthanasia. The press won't let me not know it at this point.
But yet, none of these other religions led by a single figure receive this kind of scrutiny. Why? Is it just because there are 1.2 billion Catholics? Is it because neither the Greek Orthodox Church, Shia Islam, nor Tibetan Buddhism are significantly represented in the US population? I am honestly curious.
But I've been thinking (a dangerous prospect in the best of times); why is it that the media, and most especially the non-Catholic media, feels it is qualified to determine what the head of the Roman Catholic Church should or should not support as Church doctrine? I suppose a lot of it is human nature. We want people to believe as we do, and the choosing of a new Pope IS international news, so they feel they should comment on it. By why is it that it seems to be Popes who get this scrutiny?
I can't even name the current Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church from memory, and I have no idea when was the last time they chose a new Patriarch. But I CAN say, I don't recall any hand wringing about "will the new Patriarch support gay marriage?" Likewise, I do not know who is the current Shia Grand Ayatollah. The last one I recall was Ayatollah Khomeini, and he's been dead for decades. Did anyone question the new Grand Ayatollah's stance on contraception? No? I can't recall any such discussion. The current Dali Lama? Anyone know his name? His position on euthanasia? I suppose I could look all this up, but it's actually irrelevant. I know Pope Francis I's stance on gay marriage, contraception, and euthanasia. The press won't let me not know it at this point.
But yet, none of these other religions led by a single figure receive this kind of scrutiny. Why? Is it just because there are 1.2 billion Catholics? Is it because neither the Greek Orthodox Church, Shia Islam, nor Tibetan Buddhism are significantly represented in the US population? I am honestly curious.
Resistance
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago":
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . . The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
Riding
It's amazing how few people you see when you go several miles out to camp in weather that is well below freezing. A fellow I once knew said, "If you could remove the pain, then everyone would be doing it."
I'm back. It's been a good run.
Bad data! Bad!
I enjoy AVI commenter BS King's blog "Bad Data! Bad!" The newest post takes apart a questionable study linking sugar consumption to depression. Great embedded video, too.
Much writing about different kinds of sugar, other carbohydrates, nutrition, and "empty calories" doesn't pass the laugh test. Add something like depression in and you can really go off the deep end.
Much writing about different kinds of sugar, other carbohydrates, nutrition, and "empty calories" doesn't pass the laugh test. Add something like depression in and you can really go off the deep end.
And in other news, water remains wet
Today, in a move that shocked thousands of journalists, the Roman Catholic Church chose a Pope who plans on upholding Catholic Doctrine. Amongst his other monstrous flaws (aside from being Catholic) the new Pope is not a woman, not a homosexual, not under the age of 75, not a non-white... he even has the audacity to be a Jesuit. Sally Quinn was reportedly hospitalized with a case of the vapors. The nerve of some two-thousand year old organizations!
"They fight, and this makes them happy."
Maggie's Farm pointed me to an article about the tribal warfare that broke out among anthropologists studying the Yanomami. Napoleon Chagnon raised hackles among his professional peers by suggesting that
Yanomami men who were killers had more wives and children than men who were not. Was the men’s aggression the main reason for their greater reproductive success? Chagnon suggested that the question deserved serious consideration. “Violence,” he speculated, “may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture.” The article was seized on by the press, including two newspapers in Brazil, where illegal gold miners had begun invading Yanomami lands. The Brazilian Anthropological Association warned that Chagnon’s “dubious scientific conclusions” could have terrible political consequences. . . .
Scientists have since endorsed Chagnon’s Science article. “It shouldn’t be a shocking finding,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard evolutionary psychologist who cites the paper in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” told me. “As a pattern in history, it’s well documented.” Pinker said that he was troubled by the notion that social scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects because it could be exploited by others. “This whole tactic is a terrible mistake: always putting your moral action in jeopardy of empirical findings,” he told me. “Once you have the equation that the Yanomami are nonviolent and deserve to be protected, the converse is that if they are violent they don’t deserve to be protected.”
He really means it this time
Why Republicans should believe that President Obama's "outreach" is real and he's not going to pull the football away:
The president and his advisers believe that a grand budget deal would help an economy that is poised to take off. Recent economic data, including February's strong jobs numbers, confirm their view that economic conditions are on the upswing. If the president can contribute to fixing the budget mess, consumers and companies will spend more and the economy will blossom. The president would be able to claim he revived the economy after the worst downturn since the Great Depression. A grand bargain would also allow him to say that even though everyone thought Washington was broken, he was able to forge a deal that tackled a problem people tell pollsters they care the most about.
Now, let's consider the glory associated with the outreach-as-trap theory. If the endgame were to win the 17 Democratic seats necessary for Democrats to take control the House—a few seats won’t do—that would be an accomplishment, but not really one to light up the history books. More important, it wouldn't reflect direct glory on Obama.The comments are the usual Slate stuff about how Republicans don't want to work with Obama because they're evil and he's black.
We're not dead yet
Sarah Hoyt is a Portuguese immigrant science fiction writer whose work I've never read, but she has a good blog. A post from earlier this week on the sorry state of public education drew an amazing number of comments with even more amazing horror stories. (A favorite anecdote: her son once let the cat out of the bag, informing his teachers that his mom used the public school as a babysitter for eight hours every day so she could get some writing done, after which his real education took place at home during the three hours or so after school let out.)
Today's post responds to the depressed nature of many of the comments:
Today's post responds to the depressed nature of many of the comments:
Yes, our education is beyond screwed up. BUT here’s the thing, fundamentally they’re not transforming anything. Fundamentally, the US is descended from or populated by people who said “I can’t take this anymore” and moved. That is a completely different stock from those who stayed.
Even the Mexican immigrants who are simply walking over the border, are different from the ones who stay. (In fact, our economy has caused a wave of returning immigrants who ARE fundamentally transforming Mexico – and good for them.)
I don’t think most Americans – or most colonials in general – FULLY realize how different. The tendency of humans is to clan: to stay near family and childhood friends. It’s also territorial. You cleave to familiar landscapes. The only way to get masses of people to move, normally, is famine or war.
Most of us and most of our ancestors (with exceptions) moved long before it got to that point. That it wasn’t to that point is attested to by the fact that most of our/our ancestors’ relatives stayed behind.Well, maybe I'll have to try her science fiction.
Between worlds
An adult who received a cochlear implant at age six reports that the brain interprets any unfamiliar sensation as pain. He also reflects on the identity issues that have roiled the deaf community in recent decades:
Sometimes, I think back to one of the questions that I asked my mom before I got my [cochlear implant]. I asked her if I would be deaf or hearing. She told me that I'd be both. I don't think that's true. I'm neither deaf nor hearing. I don't sign as often anymore, but I don't speak or hear well enough to be like hearing people.Oliver Sacks wrote an excellent book about this: "Seeing Voices." He spent time on an island -- Martha's Vineyard, I think -- with a very high proportion of congenitally deaf residents. So many were deaf that an unusual number even of hearing people were fluent in ASL. If he asked someone whether Joe So-and-So was deaf, they would stop and consider. "Joe? Let me think. Yes, I think old Joe was deaf."
The click heard round the world
Slate runs an interesting article about lock-picking in 1851 and the first shifting of the ground beneath Victorians' feet.
The bee in James Taranto's bonnet
Much as I like James Taranto on most subjects, I don't understand him at all on gender roles. He's at it again today, writing about the historical effect on black society of a high ratio of women to men, and extrapolating to society at large:
As this column has repeatedly noted, women are hypergamous, which means that their instinct is to be attracted to men of higher status than themselves. When the societywide status of women increases relative to men, the effect is to diminish the pool of suitable men for any given woman. If most women reject most men as not good enough for them, the effect is no different from that of a low sex ratio.Hmm, always have to wonder about that word "instinct." Isn't it also possible that the supposed natural attraction of women to higher-status men is an outgrowth of the difficulty of women achieving status of their own, and that it's fading now along with those difficulties? Hypergamity is nothing I've ever experienced, at any rate, so I'm a little disinclined to accept that it's an instinct. Why would I look to a man to lend me status? It's weird. I want a man to be my partner, not my fairy godmother. If women are getting used to being able to win their own "status," whatever that is and however important it is to them, maybe we'll see a trend in which they quit chasing a diminishing pool of higher-status men with nicer cars and start choosing mates on the basis of wild ideas like character, grit, good sense, and willingness to be good fathers.
Old Ghosts
David Foster reminds us that it has been a year since Neptunus Lex's sudden death. Foster remembers him with links to some favorite posts, including this fine one about leadership.
Therapy
What kind of a meanie wouldn't let me bring this cute little fella to class with me?
To tell the truth, if I were put in charge of all the difficult questions over where people should be allowed to take their animals, I'd rubber-stamp 'em all "approved." But I still shake my head in dismay over a lawsuit brought under federal fair housing laws to require a school to accommodate a "therapy animal" prescribed to a student to supply her with "emotional support and attachment (reducing symptoms of depression), and physiological and psychological benefits." The school bent over backward to accommodate her, too, insisting only that she couldn't bring her therapy animal into class or into food service areas. Now they've agreed to pay her $40,000.
Still, I say: bring all the therapy animals on. I'm going to enjoy restaurants, doctor's office visits, movie theaters, and even plane rides a lot more if they're chock-full of animals. I'd like to see a lawsuit over a therapy boa constrictor, or perhaps an elephant. Elephants are a sure cure for depression and attachment disorders in my book.
To tell the truth, if I were put in charge of all the difficult questions over where people should be allowed to take their animals, I'd rubber-stamp 'em all "approved." But I still shake my head in dismay over a lawsuit brought under federal fair housing laws to require a school to accommodate a "therapy animal" prescribed to a student to supply her with "emotional support and attachment (reducing symptoms of depression), and physiological and psychological benefits." The school bent over backward to accommodate her, too, insisting only that she couldn't bring her therapy animal into class or into food service areas. Now they've agreed to pay her $40,000.
Still, I say: bring all the therapy animals on. I'm going to enjoy restaurants, doctor's office visits, movie theaters, and even plane rides a lot more if they're chock-full of animals. I'd like to see a lawsuit over a therapy boa constrictor, or perhaps an elephant. Elephants are a sure cure for depression and attachment disorders in my book.
Riding Out
Time to go, again.
The Savannah River, below Lake Hartwell
I will be in the Wild for a few days. I'd like to take up Tex's post on Natural Law when I get back. In the meantime you are in the good hands of each other, companions of the Hall.
The Savannah River, below Lake Hartwell
I will be in the Wild for a few days. I'd like to take up Tex's post on Natural Law when I get back. In the meantime you are in the good hands of each other, companions of the Hall.
Stodgy progressives
A couple of old Coyote Blogs from the good old days before Hope and Change. First, how progressives are conservative:
. . . I must say that on a number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social issues, I call progressives my allies. On social issues, progressives, like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others.
However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making. Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use. Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds. And, Progressives who support the right of third worlders to strap on a backpack of TNT and explode themselves in the public market don't trust these same third worlders to make the right decision in choosing to work in the local Nike shoe plant.
Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism. Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic," the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them. Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty. They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount. That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.Second, why the labor theory of value is lunacy.
People going "poof"
From House of Eratosthenes:
Liberalism is all about wishing things out to the cornfield.
Which raises the question of: What is the cornfield? This is the scary part: They don’t know. They really don’t know. Not even a little, tiny bit. They are not like the semiconductor manufacturer working to make sure anything that might be a contaminant is kept outside of the million-dollar “clean room,” or the bartender telling the argumentative customers to “take it outside,” or the TSA checkpoint that keeps you from going into a secure area until you have been “cleared.” Those agents possess a good, developed understanding of 1) criteria applied, and 2) where things should go when they fail to meet the criteria. Liberals only understand the criteria. It comes easily to them to say things like “There is no use discussing [blank] with someone like you, who can’t see [blank].” You, then, are supposed to go away — but to where? It’s completely obvious you aren’t supposed to take your money with you as you leave. They’re building a society that “works for everyone” and you’re part of the “everyone,” at least when it comes time to pay taxes, regulatory fees and union dues. How do you exclude the undesirables from an all-inclusive society that refuses to recognize undesirables? This is the puzzle they’ve never managed to solve.This rings true to me, but whenever the argument takes the form of "Liberals always. . .," I like to do the thought experiment of replacing "Liberals" with "Conservatives." I suppose we all do our share of wishing people out to the cornfield. On the other hand, I'm not sure conservatives expect liberals to leave their wallets behind when they go "poof."
"Personnel and whatnot"
Screenshot of redacted EPA email produced in response to a FOIA request. The message was sent under former Director Lisa Jackson's alternative identity "Richard Windsor," which she allegedly used to circumvent FOIA obligations.
H/t GlobalWarming.org
Related: activists try to FOIA the FOIA process.
H/t GlobalWarming.org
Related: activists try to FOIA the FOIA process.
Anti-mnemonics
“ROLLERBLADING MEN INVITED VITRIOL UNTIL X GAMES.” That's how you can remember the waves on the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma), in case you ever need to. But then you'll need a mnemonic for the not-so-memorable mnemonic.
Y'all come on down
One more reason to move to Texas: The Sunset Commission, which has led to the abolition of 78 state agencies and saved nearly a billion dollars in the 29 years since it was established.
If we turn out to miss one that we abolished, it's only too easy to bring it back.
If we turn out to miss one that we abolished, it's only too easy to bring it back.
More from McSweeneys
We can say we love each other all we want, but I just can’t trust it without the data.
See also "Hello, and welcome to the interactive call center for my girlfriend."
Russian Driving
You know, I've occasionally suspected that our brothers at BSBFBs might be cherry-picking their Russian driver videos.
Not so, it turns out!
I apologize that the thought ever crossed my mind, gentlemen.
Not so, it turns out!
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
More here:I apologize that the thought ever crossed my mind, gentlemen.
Magic scissors
A tangled web indeed. First a CDC politico tries to explain why $30 million in sequester cuts to a vaccination program would have killed the children while the President's magic powers could cut $60 million from the same program without hurting anyone. My favorite part is at the end, addressing the White House's new program to "re-calibrate" its sequester message in the wake of a pile of Pinocchios awarded by those conservative troglodytes at the Washington Post: The White House plans to "de-emphasize the veracity of its previous statements."
Speaking of…Science
I was walking with my wife in this morning's frigid sucker
hole in the weather when I flashed on a solution to both of our age's major
questions: where are the other intelligent life forms, and where is the universe's
missing mass?
The answer is breathtakingly simple, and it solves both
mysteries.
The missing intelligences have been present all along, and
they're still here. They've just placed
themselves inside Dyson shells. We can't detect the intelligences because
of the lack of emissions, other than gravity, escaping the shells.
The gravity part is key to the other solution. The so-called missing mass currently is
considered to be composed of "dark matter" that doesn't interact with
the composition of our universe, except…gravitationally. How convenient a set of characteristics.
The missing mass, clearly, is ordinary matter; it's just contained
within all of those Dyson shells. After
all, there are a double potful of LGMs and BEMs, and they've all built these
spheres.
Why would a species do such a thing rather than getting out
and about, or at least shouting out their existence to the universe around them? Speculating on the motives of an alien
mindset—that really would be magical thinking.
I’m ready for my NSF and NASA grants, which I promise only
to use for good.
Eric Hines
Comet alert
We may get a glimpse of a comet just after sunset for the next few days. Comet Pan-STARRS came within about 100 million miles of Earth a few days ago and now is going to come within about 45 million miles of the Sun. That will make it bright, but unfortunately it also means we'll only get a glimpse right after sunset. It's worth a try tonight, though viewing may be better for the next couple of days after. We're nearly at dark of the moon; that will not only help with viewing but possibly give us a dramatic contrast in a couple of days, when the new crescent moon will be just above the horizon near the comet right after sunset.
I got a pretty good look at a comet -- was it Hale-Bopp? -- in the mid-90s from the window of a commercial airliner.
I got a pretty good look at a comet -- was it Hale-Bopp? -- in the mid-90s from the window of a commercial airliner.
The way to a man's heart . . .
. . . Is through his coffee cup. Well, not literally a man, but a flying insect vis-à-vis flowers trying to decide what kind of nectar will keep 'em coming back for more. It seems that citrus nectar has a lot of caffeine in it. In controlled experiments,"three times as many bees remembered the connection between odor and reward if the reward contained caffeine."
The article says that citrus leaves have toxic levels of caffeine, presumably to ward off insects. I must say that it doesn't deter leaf-cutter ants. They go straight for our citrus trees, preferring them over almost every other leaf, and can strip and kill a tree in days. They've been particularly bad this year.
H/t Rocket Science.
The article says that citrus leaves have toxic levels of caffeine, presumably to ward off insects. I must say that it doesn't deter leaf-cutter ants. They go straight for our citrus trees, preferring them over almost every other leaf, and can strip and kill a tree in days. They've been particularly bad this year.
H/t Rocket Science.
No problem with the California budget
Guest blogger Gregg Stevens at CoyoteBlog reminds most of us why we're not trying to make a living in California, and why Douglas really needs to get working on that exit strategy. The operator of a camping site near Eureka in extreme Northern California, Stevens found one day that a large fir tree had fallen over into the river, leaving a hole six feet deep and ten feet wide. Thus began a strange and wonderful journey through familiar bureaucratic mazes he fondly imagined he already had mastered, in pursuit of permission to move the fallen tree (now "salmon habitat") and fill the hole.
It turned out that the tree issue was readily resolved, but the hole was a problem on a Kafkaesque scale. Stevens sent off a $2,500 application fee and prepared the usual richly illustrated and annotated research paper examining the impact of filling the hole, then waited. And waited. In the meantime, he shoveled some of the displaced gravel over some exposed utility lines and put up a temporary fence to prevent campers from falling into the hole.
It turned out that the tree issue was readily resolved, but the hole was a problem on a Kafkaesque scale. Stevens sent off a $2,500 application fee and prepared the usual richly illustrated and annotated research paper examining the impact of filling the hole, then waited. And waited. In the meantime, he shoveled some of the displaced gravel over some exposed utility lines and put up a temporary fence to prevent campers from falling into the hole.
Then one winter day, more than a year after I had filed the application, I received a certified letter from the Coastal Commission. They had been surreptitiously monitoring the work we had done, or not done, at the site. And we were looking at a fine of $30,000 and up to $15,000 per day for doing the work. Or not doing the work. The letter was a bit vague on that part. But one thing was clear. Whatever it was we had or hadn’t done was wrong and thoroughly illegal. And we were to be punished severely for it.But all's well that ends well. No one was driven into bankruptcy this time, the salmon continue their happy lives uninterrupted, and all the wonders of modern technology were brought to bear on a cavity-mitigation project that's not quite visible from space.
The man who killed 40,000 elephants
He loved elephants, but he did it to save the land. Then he found it made desertification worse instead of better, and devoted the rest of his life to figuring out why. These are his conclusions and proposed solutions. He and his team have restored desertified grazing land on several continents by increasing grazing herds instead of decreasing them, with careful rotation and movement. It sounds a lot like what Joel Salatin does with his moveable fences and frequently moved cattle herds. It's also a good deal like the restoration of cool oases from hot desert that is described in Gaia's Garden, a favorite permaculture resource in the Texan99 household.
The before-and-after shots are like something out of a dream of Paradise. These are results he's achieving on poor lands with poor people.
H/t Watts Up with That, who's more excited about this than I've ever seen him.
The before-and-after shots are like something out of a dream of Paradise. These are results he's achieving on poor lands with poor people.
H/t Watts Up with That, who's more excited about this than I've ever seen him.
Taxing today to pay for yesterday
The "Antiplanner" reacts poorly to a San Francisco councilman's proposal to tax email to help the U.S. Postal Service out with its operating deficit.
H/t a comment to an article linked by Rhymes with Cars and Girls, from Free Northerner, about Matthew Yglesias's inability to understand how we might structure a rail system that didn't rely on taxpayer subsidies: "What kind of system could possibly cause people to invest resources in providing valued services to others in an efficient manner solely so they can profit from operating surpluses?"
H/t a comment to an article linked by Rhymes with Cars and Girls, from Free Northerner, about Matthew Yglesias's inability to understand how we might structure a rail system that didn't rely on taxpayer subsidies: "What kind of system could possibly cause people to invest resources in providing valued services to others in an efficient manner solely so they can profit from operating surpluses?"
Hoaxes
I'm obsessed with hoaxes lately, and our ability to admit what we don't know. This is a wonderful art quiz. Can you tell the masterpiece from the hoax? I scored a 67%. This is a similar quiz. Again I scored a 67%.
Visual arts not your thing? Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German. I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.
Visual arts not your thing? Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German. I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.
iCure for cancer
The guy who writes "Rhymes with Cars and Girls" under the pen-name "The Crimson Reach" is a funny man. Today he wonders whassup with Apple these days:
And of course as everyone knows it’s been like a year and a half (AT LEAST) since Apple has released a revolutionary new product every single year. That’s a long time. Is Apple dead? The answer seems clear. This is cold hard objective number reasons going on. It’s not like there was just a Steve Jobs personality cult or something.His blog banner reads:
Dabbler who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about very little. All lies within The Crimson Reach.
This blog has been FULLY vetted AND fact-checked. (There were some issues.)
Natural law
From First Things, as I continue thinking about Grim's question about where Heidegger went wrong:
The truth is that we cannot talk intelligibly about natural law if we have not all first agreed upon what nature is and accepted in advance that there really is a necessary bond between what is and what should be. Nor can that bond be understood in naturalistic terms. Even if it were clearly demonstrable that for the majority of persons the happiest life is also the most wholesome, and that most of us find spiritual and corporeal contentment by observing a certain “natural” ethical mean—still, the daringly disenchanted moralist might ask: “What do we owe to nature?”
To his mind, after all, the good may not be contentment or even justice, but the extension of the pathos of the will, as Nietzsche would put it: the poetic labor of the will to power, the overcoming of the limits of the merely human, the justification of the purely fortuitous phenomenon of the world through its transformation into a supreme aesthetic event. What if he should choose to believe (and are not all values elective values for the secular moralist?) that the most exalted object of the will is the Übermensch, that natural prodigy or fortunate accident that now must become the end to which human culture consciously aspires?
Denounce him, if you wish, for the perversity of his convictions. Still, after all hypothetical imperatives have been adduced, and all appeals to the general good have been made, nothing would logically oblige him to alter his ideas. Only the total spiritual conversion of his vision of reality could truly change his thinking.
To put the matter very simply, belief in natural law is inseparable from the idea of nature as a realm shaped by final causes, oriented in their totality toward a single transcendent moral Good: one whose dictates cannot simply be deduced from our experience of the natural order, but must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations that nevertheless, miraculously, makes the natural order intelligible to us as a reality that opens up to what is more than natural.
There is no logically coherent way to translate that form of cosmic moral vision into the language of modern “practical reason” or of public policy debate in a secular society. Our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions. And, in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature’s “laws” must appear to be anything but moral.
German philosophy
In "The Weimar Touch," A.J. Goldmann explores the German influence on American film culture when Jews and others fled Germany starting in 1933. Ed Driscoll goes further, and posits a broad intellectual American takeover by the Weimar Republic:
[T]o respond to the query by Thomas Friedman last year in the New York Times, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’
Well, 50 years ago, we did, didn’t we?He quotes Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind":
I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier. . . .
Feedback
One of the weakest points in the anthropogenic global warming argument is the heavy reliance on positive feedback assumptions. CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, and can be projected to cause rapid, catastrophic warming only if we assume that it will increase water vapor, which is turn is a much stronger greenhouse gas. The problem is that there is little evidence that the positive feedback mechanism exists, and even some reason to suppose that the feedback may be negative. New evidence from NASA's water vapor project highlights the uncertainty:
Climate models predict upper atmosphere moistening which triples the greenhouse effect from man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The new satellite data from the NASA water vapor project shows declining upper atmosphere water vapor during the period 1988 to 2001. . . . The cooling effect of the water vapor changes on OLR [outgoing longwave radiation] is 16 times greater than the warming effect of CO2 during the 1990 to 2001 period. Radiosonde data shows that upper atmosphere water vapor declines with warming. . . . Both satellite data and radiosonde data confirm the absence of any tropical upper atmosphere temperature amplification, contrary to IPCC theory. Four independent data sets demonstrate that the IPCC theory is wrong. CO2 does not cause significant global warming.
Unclear on the concept
From the Washington Post, an explanation of the forecasting embarrassment that was Snowquester:
Still, I blame the storm more than I blame the computer models. The models are pretty good. It’s Nature that messed this up.H/t Watts Up with That, which adds the comment: "I hope he escapes from his alternate reality soon, people must be looking for him."
Swimming
Can you remember when you learned to swim? I was too young, but I'm sure I wasn't an infant. I've seen shows demonstrating that babies can learn. I've never known anyone, thank God, who lost a child to drowning. It was bad enough that a young school friend lost her dog that way during the family dinner, an experience that's always made me teach young dogs where the steps in the pool were, on those rare occasions when any of my dogs have encountered a pool.
More school bashing
Or is it more Big Apple bashing? Both, of course, but in another sense not really. Obviously, this CBS report that 80% of graduates from New York City high schools need remedial classes in the three Rs before they can start on credit courses in community college is an indictment of New York City public schools. But there are two nuggets embedded in the story that inspire a bit of hope. One is that the community college system hasn't caved in to what must be considerable pressure to dumb down the entry-level credit courses so that they include material that ought to have been taught in high school. The other is that the community colleges apparently have a system for quickly teaching the kids what they missed in high school, so we know it can be done. We just don't know why the high schools can't do it, at least for kids motivated enough to seek additional education after they've finished high school.
The One Horse Town of Nelson, Georgia
Well, not one horse exactly.
Sort of in between the two towns is Two Brothers Barbecue, which gives every sign of being more populous than either of these metropolises of an evening.
It's a lawless, lawless region.
The town has one police officer who is on patrol eight hours a day, leaving residents largely to fend for themselves the rest of the time.I know that area very well. The next "town" over is Ball Ground, which was very close to where I grew up. I guess Ball Ground has a police department too -- I know it does, because I've seen their car parked on the street. Their officers I haven't seen, not in all the years I've passed through there.
Sort of in between the two towns is Two Brothers Barbecue, which gives every sign of being more populous than either of these metropolises of an evening.
It's a lawless, lawless region.
The courage not to know
By "the courage not to know," I'm not referring to anything as obscure as Keats's "negative capability," just the willingness to admit that we have no basis for an opinion when we lack all information. Take the nice, caring people in this video, who are trying to reach a responsible position on issues of public policy:
H/t House of Eratosthenes. Or to take another example, Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this description of Richard Feynman's experience on a California school board textbook committee. The other committee members took such careful notes of what he said about most of the many books they were to have reviewed that he gradually understood they hadn't actually read most of them. One set was supposed to contain three volumes, but he received only two. Committee members kept asking him what his opinion was of the third book, and he kept answering that he hadn't read it and therefore had no opinion. Many of the other members had rated it. Then a representative of the publisher joined the meeting and explained that they hadn't been able to make the publishing deadline for the third book, so they'd included a set of blank pages between the usual covers, meaning to include the real book later. The other reviewers were so determined to have an opinion that they came up with a rating on a book with blank pages.
Only one of the people interviewed in the video above was willing to come right out and say she had no idea what the absurd question meant.
H/t House of Eratosthenes. Or to take another example, Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this description of Richard Feynman's experience on a California school board textbook committee. The other committee members took such careful notes of what he said about most of the many books they were to have reviewed that he gradually understood they hadn't actually read most of them. One set was supposed to contain three volumes, but he received only two. Committee members kept asking him what his opinion was of the third book, and he kept answering that he hadn't read it and therefore had no opinion. Many of the other members had rated it. Then a representative of the publisher joined the meeting and explained that they hadn't been able to make the publishing deadline for the third book, so they'd included a set of blank pages between the usual covers, meaning to include the real book later. The other reviewers were so determined to have an opinion that they came up with a rating on a book with blank pages.
Only one of the people interviewed in the video above was willing to come right out and say she had no idea what the absurd question meant.
Canterbury Tales
Victor Davis Hanson continues worrying about the future of California:
In medieval California, the elderly and retired sometimes head to the foothills, a poorer man’s coast, where there is less crime and less worry over what California has become. I never quite fathomed fully why a classical Greece of city-states on the plains became an Ottoman Greece of villages perched on mountain slopes. I knew, of course, in the abstract that Greeks fled Turks to escape the taxman, conversion to Islam, and the Janissaries, but I can now appreciate that maybe such a sense of impending dread is real in interior California, as valley towns become darker at night from lights that no longer work, and streets that are no longer safe and assumptions that are no longer familiar. Even the most liberal retired professor seems to head for the hills once his thirty years at CSU are up.
Wah
I find this kind of thing completely incomprehensible. The assumption seems to be that men can't be strong unless woman artificially make themselves weak. Where does this come from?
Sugar sugar
I thought this was a joke when I found it in my inbox, but apparently it's not. It's a whole website full of ultra-serious discussions about the fell hand of Big Candy, which wants to drive down sugar prices with cheap imports and deprive Americans of reasonably priced chocolate bars. (What will Rand Paul use to sustain himself during his next filibuster?)
As Europeans discovered how to grow and process this labor-intensive product in their hot-climate colonies, it spurred some of the earliest large-scale slave-labor economies. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, crystallized sugar was priced similarly to nutmeg and cloves. By the 18th century, supplies increased and prices dropped enough to permit sugar consumption to soar. In the middle of that century, a German chemist discovered beet root as an alternative source, which grew in importance after Napoleon cut off sugar imports from England in 1813. Sugar production became increasingly mechanized and less dependent on large supplies of cheap labor.
Currently, the U.S. relies more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup for sweetening. Developed in 1957, HFCS began to swamp the market in the 1980s after import sugar tariffs, imposed in 1977, inspired food processors to seek a cheaper substitute. U.S. and Canadian sugar prices are at twice the global market level, while corn production is heavily subsidized.
Sidney Mintz wrote a book about the role of sugar in history that is said to rank with other recent epics about salt, potatoes, and corn. I haven't read Mintz's work, but the other three were great.
----- A Message from American Sugar Alliance ----- U.S. sugar policy ensures homegrown supplies, instead of depending on unreliable imports, as we did in 1942 when sugar was rationed. Support food security. Support sugar policy.We primates do like our sweets. Sugar cane may first have been cultivated in New Guinea. At some point, people figured out how to crystallize dry sugar out of the cane juice, which produced a concentrated and easily transportable commodity. Sugar spread west to Persia, then exploded into Europe with the advance of Islam, and later with the return of Crusaders, who brought the curious "sweet salt" home with them.
As Europeans discovered how to grow and process this labor-intensive product in their hot-climate colonies, it spurred some of the earliest large-scale slave-labor economies. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, crystallized sugar was priced similarly to nutmeg and cloves. By the 18th century, supplies increased and prices dropped enough to permit sugar consumption to soar. In the middle of that century, a German chemist discovered beet root as an alternative source, which grew in importance after Napoleon cut off sugar imports from England in 1813. Sugar production became increasingly mechanized and less dependent on large supplies of cheap labor.
Currently, the U.S. relies more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup for sweetening. Developed in 1957, HFCS began to swamp the market in the 1980s after import sugar tariffs, imposed in 1977, inspired food processors to seek a cheaper substitute. U.S. and Canadian sugar prices are at twice the global market level, while corn production is heavily subsidized.
Sidney Mintz wrote a book about the role of sugar in history that is said to rank with other recent epics about salt, potatoes, and corn. I haven't read Mintz's work, but the other three were great.
History of the world
Reader James of "I Don't Know, But . . ." led me to Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine, in which the eponymous scholar publishes incisive summaries of history that are slightly less drunken and irresponsible than "1066 and All That." Dr. Boli is not a fan of Justinian. One installment details this fascinating and contradictory Byzantine ruler's reign in the 6th century A.D., while the next turns to the abrupt rise of Islam:
Another excellent post from Dr. Boli concerns unusual musical instruments.
Why did Islam spread so fast? Well, it is always very bad historical practice to assign a single cause to a complex historical event that must of necessity have had many causes. But, in a word, Justinian.In chapter 15, Charlemagne turns the lights back on. An eager public awaits the publication of chapter 16, "More Fun with Barbarians," addressing the Vikings, as prefigured by our own Lars Walker in a forward-thinking comment.
Another excellent post from Dr. Boli concerns unusual musical instruments.
Matthew 7:15-16
A question people continue to ask, decades after his death: how can we take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher, given his outright embrace of Nazism? The instinct to ask the question is the one Jesus referenced in the passage whose citation is the title of the post: When judging prophets, you will know the tree by its fruit.
So if that is right, and it seems right instinctively, poison fruit means a bad tree. But many medicines are poisons if taken in the wrong proportion.
I've been reading Heidegger recently, and some commentaries on him. He is said to be a genius, and if he impressed Hannah Arendt he must have been something like one. On the other hand, I get the strong impression that many of his commentators don't understand what he wanted to say -- not, I mean, that I understand things they have failed to understand, but that I get the sense they are flailing a bit. It is fairly clear that we are still not sure exactly what he meant to say, or why he wanted to say it.
That makes it hard to say just where he went wrong. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says it was in being too tied to the organic: favoring the family and therefore the blood, and therefore 'the race,' against the cosmopolitan. But it is possible to err in the other direction too. We often see that from liberal pundits who want to suggest that the US military ought never to be deployed except when it isn't in our interest (for humanitarian reasons, that is, but never because the US has something to gain). It may be that there is a poison here, but it may also be a medicine if you can get it in the right place, and in the right proportion.
Somehow he failed to do that.
So if that is right, and it seems right instinctively, poison fruit means a bad tree. But many medicines are poisons if taken in the wrong proportion.
I've been reading Heidegger recently, and some commentaries on him. He is said to be a genius, and if he impressed Hannah Arendt he must have been something like one. On the other hand, I get the strong impression that many of his commentators don't understand what he wanted to say -- not, I mean, that I understand things they have failed to understand, but that I get the sense they are flailing a bit. It is fairly clear that we are still not sure exactly what he meant to say, or why he wanted to say it.
That makes it hard to say just where he went wrong. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says it was in being too tied to the organic: favoring the family and therefore the blood, and therefore 'the race,' against the cosmopolitan. But it is possible to err in the other direction too. We often see that from liberal pundits who want to suggest that the US military ought never to be deployed except when it isn't in our interest (for humanitarian reasons, that is, but never because the US has something to gain). It may be that there is a poison here, but it may also be a medicine if you can get it in the right place, and in the right proportion.
Somehow he failed to do that.
When oil failed to peak
Stanley Kurtz has a three-part article in National Review Online about the movement to divest university funds of their fossil-fuel holdings. In part one, he introduces us to Bill McKibben, the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist who advocates leaving 80% of known fossil-fuel reserves underground. "Since writing off 80 percent of reserves would wreck the oil industry’s profitability, McKibben maintains that only government compulsion can keep all that energy underground — through a steeply escalating carbon tax, for example." He also notes the discovery by McKibben's ally Naomi Klein "that the reparations movement had dropped its polarizing label and had seized instead upon 'climate debt' as a backdoor way of advancing global wealth redistribution."
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
McKibben is convinced that averting global warming requires a winding-down of modernity. . . . Th[e] [pre-modern] world of tight families and interdependent neighbors, says McKibben, was far more satisfying than our hyper-individualist, consumer-driven, tech-saturated present. He explains that his attraction to this pre-industrial social model long predated his encounter with the “greenhouse effect” in the Eighties. . . . Living in an increasingly isolating, secular, and materialist universe, McKibben’s young followers seem intent on turning climate apocalypticism into a substitute religion. That won’t fill the gap. You can run from the economy, but you can’t hide. And catastrophism alone will not a morality make.McKibben has pivoted adroitly to address changing beliefs about fuel reserves and climate, from global cooling to global warming, and from peak oil to the need to sequester 80% of supplies that suddenly are burgeoning to dangerous levels:
Just three years after McKibben consigned peak-oil denialism to the dustbin of history, peakism itself looks ready for the broom. Drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other technologies for tapping so-called unconventional oil have ushered in a new era of fossil-fuel abundance. And it has all followed the classical economist’s playbook. As oil scarcity forced prices up, technical innovations once too costly to consider increased supply. Mistaken end-of-oil predictions have been issued since the dawn of the industrial age. All have been swept away by technological breakthroughs driven by the law of supply and demand.
While a few peak-oilers hold out, McKibben himself seems to have surrendered. Not scarcity but fossil-fuel abundance is our problem, he now says. His divestment campaign is essentially an attempt to induce peak oil artificially, via political pressure.Today's final installment examines the level of debate-squelching needed to make all this seem like good sense to the voters now emerging from fine campuses.
"Extraordinary"
What does 'extraordinary' mean?.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in "an extraordinary circumstance," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.Well, nobody doubted that, if "extraordinary" means "a state of war or insurrection." The examples given in the letter are Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both odd examples since they don't involve US citizens as aggressors. If you'd shot down the planes on 9/11, for example, you'd have killed some US citizens... but it would have been accidental to your purpose. It would have been justifiable under the Just War Doctrine of Double Effect for that reason.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Trauma
The school where a budding juvenile delinquent chewed his poptart into the shape of a gun and was suspended is now offering counseling for anyone traumatized by the event. As Reason.com notes:
To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be "troubled" not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realization that they're powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.
Arms manufacturers voting with their feet
Sounds like some sensible states may get a chance to lure jobs away from gun-hating home states.
Price fixing
We're sure it will work this time.
The natural gas industry is experiencing a boom from shale and fracking. Dow Chemical wants to keep gas prices low so it will have a cheap source of feedstock. "'Unchecked LNG export licensing can cause demand shocks, and the resulting price volatility can have substantial adverse impacts on U.S. manufacturing and competitiveness,' Mr. Liveris [of Dow] said in prepared testimony" before a Senate committee. Translation: If gas producers can sell overseas, the increased demand will raise prices, and I deserve to have them held artificially low.
It's encouraging to see that J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat with 24 years of experience on the U.S. Senate Energy Committee, completely grasps the principles of supply, demand, and pricing:
The natural gas industry is experiencing a boom from shale and fracking. Dow Chemical wants to keep gas prices low so it will have a cheap source of feedstock. "'Unchecked LNG export licensing can cause demand shocks, and the resulting price volatility can have substantial adverse impacts on U.S. manufacturing and competitiveness,' Mr. Liveris [of Dow] said in prepared testimony" before a Senate committee. Translation: If gas producers can sell overseas, the increased demand will raise prices, and I deserve to have them held artificially low.
It's encouraging to see that J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat with 24 years of experience on the U.S. Senate Energy Committee, completely grasps the principles of supply, demand, and pricing:
The free market might not always lead to everyone's definition of the sweet spot, but experience has shown that it is a better allocator and regulator than bureaucrats and politicians. We should heed the admonition of Adam Smith that demand begets supply: Allow the free market to allocate the nation's newfound energy bounty.Unfortunately, he's been out of office since 1997. The current batch of idiots will try anything to destroy the newly booming energy market, whether it's lunatic EPA regulations, price-fixing schemes, or squelching of pipelines. Thank Heaven for the House. For now.
Spring is Coming
Aye, and so are the rakes.
St. Patrick's Day is close, now. It's worth getting a song in your heart.
Now here's another song, perhaps appropriate given the recent push for gun control and the general utilitarian desire to control us for our own good.
Well, the Irish aren't the only ones who have their hearts in the right place.
St. Patrick's Day is close, now. It's worth getting a song in your heart.
Now here's another song, perhaps appropriate given the recent push for gun control and the general utilitarian desire to control us for our own good.
Well, the Irish aren't the only ones who have their hearts in the right place.
Past Things Are Never Probable...
...nor improbable. Not, at least, if you are English.
What does it mean to say that there was a chance of a past event going otherwise? It means saying that the past is not ruled by physics, at least not as we generally understand physics. The house burned down for physical reasons that ought to be reliable: the heat plus the fuel plus the air. Given that, and a response from the fire department slower than Y, and the house should burn.
I think the judges got this one right. Taking an alternative view requires some philosophical sophistication that is incompatible with democracy. But even given that sophistication, it seems wrong to me.
The idea that you can assign probabilities to events that have already occurred, but where we are ignorant of the result, forms the basis for the Bayesian view of probability. Put very broadly, the 'classical' view of probability is in terms of genuine unpredictability about future events, popularly known as 'chance' or 'aleatory uncertainty'. The Bayesian interpretation allows probability also to be used to express our uncertainty due to our ignorance, known as 'epistemic uncertainty', and popularly expressed as betting odds. Of course there are all gradations, from pure chance (think radioactive decay) to processes assumed to be pure chance (lottery draws), to future events whose odds depend on a mixture of genuine unpredictability and ignorance of the facts (whether Oscar Pistorius will be convicted of murder), to pure epistemic uncertainty (whether Oscar Pistorius knowingly shot his girlfriend).Well, yes, that seems to be right. It's true that Bayesian probability allows you to assign probability to past events, but it is characteristic of the Bayesian approach that a probability that reaches 1 or 0 never changes thereafter.
The judges went on to say:The chances of something happening in the future may be expressed in terms of percentage. Epidemiological evidence may enable doctors to say that on average smokers increase their risk of lung cancer by X%. But you cannot properly say that there is a 25 per cent chance that something has happened. Either it has or it has not.
What does it mean to say that there was a chance of a past event going otherwise? It means saying that the past is not ruled by physics, at least not as we generally understand physics. The house burned down for physical reasons that ought to be reliable: the heat plus the fuel plus the air. Given that, and a response from the fire department slower than Y, and the house should burn.
I think the judges got this one right. Taking an alternative view requires some philosophical sophistication that is incompatible with democracy. But even given that sophistication, it seems wrong to me.
If a tree falls in the forest
This story about a Florida Supreme Court decision upholding a drug arrest on the basis of a dog alert when no narcotics could be detected by humans reminds us of the dangers of outsourcing intelligent judgment to experts. Apparently the science of dog detection is settled.
First Confession
So today I made my first confession to a priest, as opposed to a kind of general confession to other people -- as I sometimes have confessed to you. It was a remarkable experience. I'm not sure what I expected it to be. What it was instead was a remarkable lightening, a genuine release of weight. I can't quite explain it, but perhaps some of you know what I mean. My sins have been grave, and greatly regretted; and to be absolved of them turns out to be moving in ways I did not expect.
I mention this in case any of you have been thinking about it. I wouldn't have thought that it would make any difference, but it turns out that it matters a lot.
I mention this in case any of you have been thinking about it. I wouldn't have thought that it would make any difference, but it turns out that it matters a lot.
Here it comes again!
Periodically a certain contingent in Washington re-discovers the problem that some Americans seem unwilling or unable to save up enough money during their working lives to provide for a secure retirement. What to do? According to Employment Benefit News,
Granted that it's a public policy problem if too many Americans lack retirement funds, is the solution really to keep enacting mandatory government retirement funds, spend the money on something else, discover with shock that people don't have adequate retirement funds, and enact new mandatory government retirement funds?
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, plans to introduce legislation this year to require businesses that don’t offer a pension or 401(k) plan with a company match to automatically enroll workers in a so-called USA Retirement Fund. . . . “The dream of a secure retirement is getting fainter and fainter,” Harkin said Feb. 12 in a speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “Savings rates are low and there’s no simple way for people to convert their savings into a stream of retirement income they can’t outlive.”Wait. Don't we already have a mandatory USA Retirement Fund? I know conservatives say it's flat busted, but it's an article of faith among progressives that conservatives are spouting defeatist nonsense: the Social Security system is fine.
Granted that it's a public policy problem if too many Americans lack retirement funds, is the solution really to keep enacting mandatory government retirement funds, spend the money on something else, discover with shock that people don't have adequate retirement funds, and enact new mandatory government retirement funds?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)