Rare and heavy

Or maybe not so rare any more.  It's hard to maintain a monopoly; someone always responds to crazy high prices by redoubling efforts to find a new supply, or a substitute.  China has been doing a fairly good job of cornering the market in rare earths since the 1990s, leading buyers in the rest of the world to charge that they cracked down on exports in order to induce other countries to locate their factories in China, where the Chinese would steal their technology.  Not all rare earths are really that rare, but the heaviest (and perhaps most useful) ones have proved elusive until recently.  However, Japan has just announced a huge find in deep seabeds off its shore.

Rare earth metals are the salt of life for the hi-tech revolution, used in iPads, plasma TVs, lasers, and catalytic converters for car engines.  Dysprosium is crucial because it is the strongest magnet in the world but also remains stable at very high temperatures.  Neodymium is used in hybrid cars, and terbium cuts power use for low-energy lightbulbs by 40pc. 

The metals are also used in precision-guided weapons, missiles such as the Hellfire, military avionics, satellites, and night-vision equipment.  America's M1A2 Abrams tank and the Aegis Spy-1 radar both rely on samarium. 

Washington was caught badly off guard when China started restricting supplies.  The US defence and energy departments have now made it an urgent priority to find other sources, but warn that it may take up to a decade to rebuild the supply-chain.  The US Magnetic Materials Association said America had drifted into a "silent crisis."

In other news, Japan is becoming increasingly nervous about Chinese saber-rattling.  Since World War II, Japan ostensibly has forsworn military solutions to international problems, while China seems to have no problem with them.

On the Jews

It's Holy Week. How much beef do we have with the Jews?

The standard answers are "A great deal" and "Not much." I'll consider any argument from the company.

"We need a measurement . . . ."

Actually, that's the last thing these guys need or want.  The very notion of the possibility of useful measurement is under increasing attack, because it implies that someone has an identifiable goal and that he should be judged by whether he's achieved it, with inconvenient consequences if he has not.  Two recent examples, the first in the area of the border security:

[A]s the immigration debate has gathered speed, even border analysts who praise the Obama administration’s enforcement efforts have grown frustrated with the Department of Homeland Security’s reluctance to produce data to assess them.

House committee members were shocked earlier this week to hear testimony from that DHS can't predict when or if ever it will develop and reveal a useful measurement for whether it is controlling the border with Mexico:

For several years before 2010, border officials used a measure known as operational control to describe the level of security along the southwest line.  But in 2010, Ms. Napolitano said the department would drop that standard, arguing it did not reflect a substantial buildup of agents and detection technology in recent years, and it was insufficiently flexible to account for the varying terrain and fast-changing conditions along the nearly 2,000-mile southwest border, where most illegal crossings occur.

Nor has the White House exactly been helpful:

Obama administration officials said on Thursday that they had resisted producing a single measure to assess the border because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

All of which sounds a lot like the long-simmering quarrels over public school testing.   In Rhode Island, there is a movement afoot to require all graduating high seniors to pass a proficiency test.  A student group objected that the test is too hard, or too unrelated to their curriculum, or both.   To prove it, they persuaded a group of reasonably successful adults, including some state senators, to take the test.  Sixty percent flunked, unable to achieve even a "partially proficient" score.  Does that mean the test is bad, or that the adults were ignorant?  Neither proposition was attractive, so the discussion veered into a familiar rut:

Students are trying to push back against the idea that a single test score can measure the entirety of a person’s value, worth, and future success by inviting objectively successful people to take the test themselves and see how they do.

. . . 

“I would much rather hire students who have the creativity and strategic thinking to pull together this effort in which 50 Rhode Island leaders will take this test than” students who sit in class and get prepared to pass “the NECAP with flying colors,” [said a senator who flunked]. 

“I think my takeaway message from this is that the test is not a good indicator of whether or not someone is going to be able to achieve academically,” she said.  “It’s not a good indicator, taken on its own, to be an indicator of academic achievement or career achievement.  And placing this barrier on our young men and women in our high schools without giving them the resources previously to ensure that they are going to succeed is just setting them up for additional failures.”

Another state senator, Adam Satchell, criticized standardized tests more generally, "arguing that a one-size-fits-all model cannot properly assess twenty-first century skills." Which are?

We’re trying to teach students twenty-first century skills--how to speak, how to use technology. That’s not what this test measures. It’s not an accurate measurement of our students.

It's a familiar complaint.  Somehow we're always designing tests, disliking the results, and arguing that they don't really measure the right thing, or that the tests are OK in their way but are being used for the wrong purpose, though it's not always easy to see what the right purpose would be and how it's different.  The Rhode Island students argue, for instance, that the standardized test under discussion for their school district was "explicitly not designed to be used to make decisions about individual students," which certainly would make it an odd test for the school district to have invested public money in.  Similarly, the border-security test now mysteriously doesn't quite measure border security:

In a recent interview, David V. Aguilar, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said he had first proposed the concept of operational control years ago when he was the chief of the Border Patrol.  He said it was meant to describe immediate conditions in limited patrol sectors, and he lamented that it had become the broadest measure of security advances across the entire border. 

“It was never meant to be applied that way,” Mr. Aguilar said.

I see only one solution.  Stop the testing.  Quit making the compensation of any state employees dependent in any way on the tasks they achieve, which only leads to bickering and resentment.  Fund border security according to a committee's estimate of the number of illegal border crossing that might have occurred under other conditions, using the models previously developed by AGW enthusiasts.  Fund schools on the basis of bums in seats, an easy metric. Better yet, since it's not their fault if the kids don't show up, pay them on the basis of citizens of school age with a pulse, whether or not they're in the classroom. In fact, to use the developing voting system as a guide, why require a pulse?

On The Other Hand, This Solves That Title IX Issue

Apparently at some point while I wasn't paying attention, someone decided it was OK for a "transgender" male to beat the crap out of women in Mixed Martial Arts. Steven Crowder writes a column opposing the idea, which indeed ought to be opposed as pure nonsense.

But let us be generous and open-minded. From a purely Roman gladiatorial perspective, I can see why they might think this idea has appeal. And I suppose it answers the PUA crowd's concerns about the bias of Title IX. As long as we can find enough men willing to "transgender" themselves, we could soon have both men's sports and "women's" sports equally dominated by men. Think of the scholarships! It might solve the disparate attendance at college issue, too.

There's just a small price to pay. Well, especially for the PUA crowd.

Here's Something You Don't See Every Day

Given his early performance, I wonder if our new Pope has one of these.

Warning from D.C.

Authorities On Alert As Hundreds Of Crazed Sociopaths Enter Congressional Chambers

Steubenville

I don't have much to say about this case, except that when I was a teenager I can remember coming across several women who were drunken to the point of incapacity. It always struck me that my duty for the evening included watching over them to make sure they were OK in the end. The young weren't any brighter or better able to handle their early experimentation with alcohol back then, but nobody got hurt on my watch.

I'm not sure why young men today don't feel the same way about things. I am sure they ought to.

Pope Francis on Gay Unions

It sounds as though, before his election to the Papacy, our new Pope had a similar notion to the one we were just discussing: a kind of legal union (what I am calling, after Aristotle, an ethical society of friendship) ought to be available for non-marriage cases. He seems to favor retaining the distinction between the institution of marriage, which is founded in the organic family, and the new institution, which is ideally founded on the manner in which a partnership of friendship can encourage virtue in each of the parties.

We'll see where this goes, now, but it points to a way in which a settlement is possible -- assuming people can accept that a family is different from a friendship, even a very close one with common property (on Aristotle's terms).

Against Keeping Score

Some advice against husbands and wives keeping a log of housework in order to ensure equal distribution:

Andy Hinds, in a response to Bradner, toyed with the idea of keeping track of the hours spent on chores. "If my log shows that I'm putting in as many hours as she is, I'm vindicated. If it shows that I'm not, then I have impetus to step up my game and make my wife happier. Win-win."

Hinds's solution here gets at the heart of why this kind of quantification is pretty much useless when you're talking about domestic chores in a relationship. Imagine that Hinds discovers that he is in fact putting in as many hours as his wife. Is that actually going to make his wife less unhappy? Here, honey, I have data showing that you are complaining for no reason. My figures confirm that your unhappiness is your own damn fault. Now, I've done my hours for the week, so I'm going to watch the tube while you fold the laundry. Ain't objectivity grand?

Objectivity, it turns out, is highly overrated.

Russian Thinkers

The Russian leadership may be tyrants in league with criminals, but at least they're smart?

It’s instructive to view ourselves through a Russian mirror. The term “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry."

There's probably some truth to that.

"Savor the Richly Deserved Defeat of Feinstein's 'Assault Weapons Ban'"

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.

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.

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.

St. Patrick's Day

In the morning...

The Irish Harp

This part of the year is rightly their hour.

Elevating the tone

Right.  It's time to get more serious around here.

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.

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!

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.

Obviously.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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."

Causation is hard

Fun with correlation-vs.-causation:  Why do climate activists hate longer lifespans?

H/t CoyoteBlog.

"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.

Fighting fire with fire

Combatting leukemia with disabled HIV.



H/t OpenMarket.org

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.

Thanks to Bookworm Room for this video:



Which elicited this comment on YouTube:  ✬ ;`*❊ *`;✬ Ⓢ Ⓤ Ⓟ Ⓔ Ⓡ ✬;`*❊*`; ✬

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!

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.

Mad Middle Earth

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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?)

----- 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:

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.