If you'd written a movie in which the terrorist attempting to assassinate government officials was an Elvis impersonator, you'd have been accused of some heavy-handed, improbable stuff.
Even Quentin Tarantino only went as far as this (Tarantino warning for language and violence):
Oh, well. Here's a lighter video on topic.
Baseball: 65-0 in Three Innings
Apparently it's possible to score 65 runs in three innings, if they last so long that the game has to be called on account of encroaching darkness (because your team can't get any outs!).
I understand this is a video feed from the game:
I understand this is a video feed from the game:
Bad explosion
A fertilizer plant has blown up in Waco. No reason to suggest it was deliberate, but it's very bad--many square blocks "leveled."
The Neuro
That's a New Euro, or perhaps a Northern Euro. They're going to need one soon.
In "The Wreck of the Euro" (hey, that would make a good song), Walter Russell Mead points out:
H/t Maggie's Farm.
In "The Wreck of the Euro" (hey, that would make a good song), Walter Russell Mead points out:
Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much.But mistakes that involve lying to ourselves by diddling a currency always matter eventually. It's very much like Richard Feynman's caution in a different context:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.A currency has many functions, but its primary one is a credible promise. Lying destroys its value, though the harm sometimes is delayed until enough people are disillusioned.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
Edie Brickell & Steve Martin Collaborate
NPR has a report about, as well as an opportunity to listen to, a new album by the above-named artists. Steve Martin is actually quite a banjo player, as we have known since he turned up to play with Earl Skruggs. Not just anyone could have pulled that off!
As for Edie Brikell, I hadn't thought of her in years. I do remember her, though.
If that is the frame, it sounds like an odd pairing. I've only listened to the first track so far, but it appears they've made it work surprisingly well. I'm always surprised to hear someone from Hollywood reference the South in their songs in a way that shows a kind of feel for the place.
As for Edie Brikell, I hadn't thought of her in years. I do remember her, though.
If that is the frame, it sounds like an odd pairing. I've only listened to the first track so far, but it appears they've made it work surprisingly well. I'm always surprised to hear someone from Hollywood reference the South in their songs in a way that shows a kind of feel for the place.
Emails, I Get Emails
I don't know how I get on so many email lists. I try and try to keep off them, but somehow I keep getting more and more emails from political action groups of all kinds. In a way it's been educational. You learn that all sides to our present conflict tend to think of their supporters as suckers... er, as easily swayed by conspiracy theories. They must be highly effective to be so common as political rhetoric.
Once in a while, though, a real conspiracy is uncovered!
Once in a while, though, a real conspiracy is uncovered!
Is Pope Francis Laying The Groundwork For A One World Religion?It turns out, he really is.
States are Better, Red States Better Still
The most interesting thing here isn't the one showing the abysmal rating for the Federal government, which has more than deserved the current disgust of the American people. It's the state rating charts.
Compare the numbers of satisfied and unsatisfied Democrats living in states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors, and vice versa. It appears clear that satisfaction is higher under Republican leadership right now -- not surprising given that Republican-led states are outperforming others in improving the incomes of their citizens as well as being a good place to start a business.
State budgets in Red states are also beginning to get under control, due to large cuts in public sector payrolls -- which, given that means a reduction of public-sector jobs, increases the degree of admiration you might have for the fact that these states have also been increasing citizens' incomes. I'm not sure that is warranted, though, because Red States also show higher food-stamp usage, which may mean that they are pushing off some of their budgetary concerns onto the Federal taxpayers. Still, insofar as they can foster higher private sector job growth, finding jobs for those formerly-public-sector workers, there's hope that such food stamp usage is merely a symptom of necessary budget cuts, and not a permanent feature of these state-level economies.
Compare the numbers of satisfied and unsatisfied Democrats living in states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors, and vice versa. It appears clear that satisfaction is higher under Republican leadership right now -- not surprising given that Republican-led states are outperforming others in improving the incomes of their citizens as well as being a good place to start a business.
State budgets in Red states are also beginning to get under control, due to large cuts in public sector payrolls -- which, given that means a reduction of public-sector jobs, increases the degree of admiration you might have for the fact that these states have also been increasing citizens' incomes. I'm not sure that is warranted, though, because Red States also show higher food-stamp usage, which may mean that they are pushing off some of their budgetary concerns onto the Federal taxpayers. Still, insofar as they can foster higher private sector job growth, finding jobs for those formerly-public-sector workers, there's hope that such food stamp usage is merely a symptom of necessary budget cuts, and not a permanent feature of these state-level economies.
Things journalists should know
The worm is turning:
My own informal survey yielded a 98% consensus in favor of my views. So I have that going for me.
If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch."Things journalists should know," according to this article, include the useful couplet:
(1) The scary scenarios are based on models; and
(2) The models don't work.Useful fact number three is that the "97%" consensus figure often thrown out in AGW debate resulted from an online survey of 10,257 earth scientists conducted by two researchers, to which 3,146 scientists replied, of which the responses of 77 were considered valid for inclusion.
My own informal survey yielded a 98% consensus in favor of my views. So I have that going for me.
Steyn on Baroness Thatcher
I thought this was a particularly excellent bit from Mr. Steyn's remarks:
On the other hand, then Dr. Hanson has written movingly about how California had once been like Ms. Thatcher's England, and how it is dying from a refusal to maintain the dams and innovations that allowed the state to flourish from Mexico to its northern border. In the Dustbowl regions, man destroyed and man restored, but not by allowing nature to resume: rather, by learning to plant trees in such a way as to allow for farming without the loss of the topsoil. In California today as in the Dustbowl of old, the failure to maintain the gardens leads to a loss of beauty and strength.
The English have a wilderness tradition too, of course. Dr. Corrine J. Saunders wrote an excellent book on the forest in Medieval romance, which she convincingly links to the Biblical desert tradition: the Wild as a place of hermitage, of testing and spiritual renewal. That is also a good thing, and a necessary thing. But perhaps they understood gardens better than we do.
Some years ago, I found myself standing next to her at dusk in the window of a country house in the English East Midlands, not far from where she grew up. We stared through the lead diamond mullions at a perfect scene of ancient rural tranquility — lawns, the “ha-ha” (an English horticultural innovation), and the fields and hedgerows beyond, looking much as it would have done half a millennium earlier. Mrs. T asked me about my corner of New Hampshire (90 percent wooded and semi-wilderness) and then said that what she loved about the English countryside was that man had improved on nature: “England’s green and pleasant land” looked better because the English had been there. For anyone with a sense of history’s sweep, the strike-ridden socialist basket case of the British Seventies was not an economic downturn but a stain on national honor.Americans have a different attitude about this, but possibly because we have failed to improve on nature in so many cases. Georgia was entirely stripped of its forests during the post-Civil War era by the colonial cotton monoculture that was imposed upon it by the banks and politicians who became so important in that era. To have gotten back the 'wooded and semi-wilderness' is an achievement, one that has restored a beauty long lost. From John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to our love of National Forests and Wilderness areas, in many cases we tend to think of nature as being incapable of improvement by human hands.
On the other hand, then Dr. Hanson has written movingly about how California had once been like Ms. Thatcher's England, and how it is dying from a refusal to maintain the dams and innovations that allowed the state to flourish from Mexico to its northern border. In the Dustbowl regions, man destroyed and man restored, but not by allowing nature to resume: rather, by learning to plant trees in such a way as to allow for farming without the loss of the topsoil. In California today as in the Dustbowl of old, the failure to maintain the gardens leads to a loss of beauty and strength.
The English have a wilderness tradition too, of course. Dr. Corrine J. Saunders wrote an excellent book on the forest in Medieval romance, which she convincingly links to the Biblical desert tradition: the Wild as a place of hermitage, of testing and spiritual renewal. That is also a good thing, and a necessary thing. But perhaps they understood gardens better than we do.
Our Skools
How parents put up with public schools is completely beyond me. I would be tearing my hair out. I hope a lot of parents are getting used to pushing back hard and often.
Wow
Both of my Senators just voted against the NRA. I don't think that's ever happened before.
Of course, it was just to open debate, not to pass a final law. If the Senators come back in the fold before the law passes, the NRA probably comes out ahead because ultimately-loyal votes look less like pets. Still, I'm surprised to see the open defiance by both of Georgia's Senators.
I suppose that opens up a possible slot to the right of Saxby Chambliss. Grim for Senate, 2014?
Of course, it was just to open debate, not to pass a final law. If the Senators come back in the fold before the law passes, the NRA probably comes out ahead because ultimately-loyal votes look less like pets. Still, I'm surprised to see the open defiance by both of Georgia's Senators.
I suppose that opens up a possible slot to the right of Saxby Chambliss. Grim for Senate, 2014?
How to create a famine
It's easy. Just try to ensure affordable food for all with doctrinaire collectivist tools. Venezuela is flirting with it:
(1) Concern for the poor.
(2) Price controls.
(3) Supply crash.
(4) Allegations of hoarding.
(5) Doubling down centralized economic control.
(6) Famine.
Where have we seen this before?
During his 14 years as president, Mr. Chávez nationalized swaths of farmland to form collectives, took control of agriculture supplies, and set limits on food prices as part of his socialist project to ensure affordable food for all.Now, to socialists' amazement, the country imports 70% of its food supply and is increasingly exposed to nutritional disaster. The government naturally blames "widespread supermarket shortages on hoarding by businesses who want to create instability and bring down the government."
(1) Concern for the poor.
(2) Price controls.
(3) Supply crash.
(4) Allegations of hoarding.
(5) Doubling down centralized economic control.
(6) Famine.
Where have we seen this before?
The Harbinger of Blood-Soaked Rainbows
So, it turns out that the Mantis Shrimp is a pretty impressive creature.
Lars Walker on Annette Funicello
Mr. Walker makes an interesting point.
Through all her career she was never – so far as I’ve been able to tell – involved in a scandal. The bikini movies were a little risque by the standards of the day, but she never did anything that crossed the line. Her image remained wholesome.... The question occurred to me today – what would have happened to her if she’d been born later, and had come to fame in our own time?
That’s not a hard question to answer. She did appear again, in a sense, in the person of Britney Spears. And Lindsey Lohan. And Miley Cyrus.
Why was Annette able to live a life of dignity, while these younger women, born with the “advantage” of a culture that claims to promote the dignity and rights of women, have quickly made public jokes (and dirty ones) of themselves?
Not to say the younger girls didn’t have lots of “help.” Hollywood is certainly a field well-strewn with pitfalls. Money and fame at an early age are dangerous drugs in themselves, even before you get to the pills and powder.
But Hollywood was no convent school in the 1950s, either. Anybody who worked there in those days will tell you the predators were out in force, and there were ample opportunities for partying.
Annette, I think, benefited from Puritanism. She benefited from a double standard. She benefited from repression, and hypocrisy, and all those awful social constraints we despise the Fifties for today.
A girl in Annette’s position, if she wanted to be a “good girl,” actually had social resources available to her. America was in her corner, back then.
Fruit of the Poisoned Tree Redux
So in a completely bizarre series of redirects, I came across this article from 1997 today:
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/1997/08/03/tec_212367.shtml
In it, there is a discussion of the fact that a widely used set of anatomical illustrations came from Nazi sympathetic sources. And there's even the possibility that the artists who created the medical illustrations may have used cadavers of victims of the Nazis. And the question arises, should their use be spurned.
And I was reminded of the "fruit of the poisoned tree" discussion The Hall had previously entertained. But this is slightly more intriguing for me. Before, the discussion was "should we hold the philosophy of a Nazi sympathizer suspect." And the answer seemed to be pretty unanimous that, indeed those ideas are tainted by his Nazism. But, this is less clear cut. Assuming the cadavers used were not victims of Nazi murder, should these anatomical painting be considered (forgive the word) verboten because of their source? Mind you, the accuracy and scientific nature of the paintings are not in question, just the morality of using diagrams painted by Nazis. Now, the discussion changes (but not necessarily the answers, depending on the individual philosophy) if the cadavers used as models were victims of the Nazis. But either way, I find myself intrigued as to the feelings of The Hall on this.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/1997/08/03/tec_212367.shtml
In it, there is a discussion of the fact that a widely used set of anatomical illustrations came from Nazi sympathetic sources. And there's even the possibility that the artists who created the medical illustrations may have used cadavers of victims of the Nazis. And the question arises, should their use be spurned.
And I was reminded of the "fruit of the poisoned tree" discussion The Hall had previously entertained. But this is slightly more intriguing for me. Before, the discussion was "should we hold the philosophy of a Nazi sympathizer suspect." And the answer seemed to be pretty unanimous that, indeed those ideas are tainted by his Nazism. But, this is less clear cut. Assuming the cadavers used were not victims of Nazi murder, should these anatomical painting be considered (forgive the word) verboten because of their source? Mind you, the accuracy and scientific nature of the paintings are not in question, just the morality of using diagrams painted by Nazis. Now, the discussion changes (but not necessarily the answers, depending on the individual philosophy) if the cadavers used as models were victims of the Nazis. But either way, I find myself intrigued as to the feelings of The Hall on this.
So Apparently This Is Racist...
Well, what isn't now?
If anything, it sounds apologetic to me -- on both sides. A worthy start, or something no one should ever dare say?
It's a good question. I'd like to have a similar conversation, and a similar consensus, with my very great friends from the war who happened to be black. We lived together day and night in those days. I wish I knew how to make a country as good as we were, in a foreign land that hated us all equally.
If anything, it sounds apologetic to me -- on both sides. A worthy start, or something no one should ever dare say?
It's a good question. I'd like to have a similar conversation, and a similar consensus, with my very great friends from the war who happened to be black. We lived together day and night in those days. I wish I knew how to make a country as good as we were, in a foreign land that hated us all equally.
Applying mathematical rigor to bollocks
The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense, with pride of place to Scientology.
Therapy for bystanders
I'm no expert, but this article confirms my husband's and my experience with amateur CPR as practiced locally by our volunteer fire department. On one occasion, a man administered CPR to his fairly young and healthy friend who collapsed right by his side, and who went on to an apparently full recovery. On every other occasion, we were acting out a strange social ritual that had very little to do with the ostensible patient.
Night Watch
I suspect most Americans wouldn't get the reference, but in Amsterdam it's still locally important enough that the folks in the mall understood.
Hurricane
Sometime take the road by Fort Mountain, and follow it east to the Maysville Saloon. Just past there is a place called Hurricane Shoals, which is worth stopping by on a pleasant afternoon in the spring. It's even better in high summer, when the water over the stones rushes cool about your ankles.
We're just this week getting real spring weather, and the trees have popped into a haze of green and red and white. My pear trees are already merrily bedecked, but the apple trees are still budding. I hope we might see some apples this year. It has been three years since I planted those trees, and I would like to eat an apple off them one day.
We're just this week getting real spring weather, and the trees have popped into a haze of green and red and white. My pear trees are already merrily bedecked, but the apple trees are still budding. I hope we might see some apples this year. It has been three years since I planted those trees, and I would like to eat an apple off them one day.
The Iron Lady Passes
We note with regret the passing of Margret Thatcher, the last of the giants of her age. There remain many lights of that age still with us, but the three greatest are now gone: Reagan, John Paul II, and now she herself.
I find myself a little surprised this morning, because somehow it never occurred to me that she could die. She seemed so indomitable that, at some un-examined and subconscious level, I must have assumed she would simply refuse.
UPDATE: Max Boot on the vindication of Thatcher against those who opposed her policies.
I find myself a little surprised this morning, because somehow it never occurred to me that she could die. She seemed so indomitable that, at some un-examined and subconscious level, I must have assumed she would simply refuse.
UPDATE: Max Boot on the vindication of Thatcher against those who opposed her policies.
Thomas Jefferson and Spammers
There's an old xkcd cartoon, thus.
The new generation of spam that has been flooding into the blog lately is sometimes almost there. Usually it's obviously automatically generated, irrelevant nonsense, but I just read a spam post on Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase that I almost published separately. The only problem with it is that, since it is spam, I'd have to look up all the details to see if they were accurate or not.
Keep it up, spammers! If you can find a way to demonstrate the accuracy of your claims as well, I might actually publish your adds for tooth ("plural teeth") caps and easy-credit loans. Footnotes maybe?
The new generation of spam that has been flooding into the blog lately is sometimes almost there. Usually it's obviously automatically generated, irrelevant nonsense, but I just read a spam post on Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase that I almost published separately. The only problem with it is that, since it is spam, I'd have to look up all the details to see if they were accurate or not.
Keep it up, spammers! If you can find a way to demonstrate the accuracy of your claims as well, I might actually publish your adds for tooth ("plural teeth") caps and easy-credit loans. Footnotes maybe?
News from the Solar Pocket Factory
These guys continue to charm me. I've rarely been so happy with a minor investment:
We've got our new Solar Pocket Factory building working panels like boomsticks, and it's fricking awesome to have a machine capable of making hundreds of thousands of solar watts a year that we can pack into our checked airplane baggage. We had us a cleantech passover seder in Hong Kong, complete with thermoelectric lights running off the shabbat candles and solar quippas with USB outputs. We just ran a booth this weekend at Shenzhen Maker Faire where people made their own panels on the spot, and i t was insanely fun. Shawn made a solar-powered flipbook. We've bought our tickets out to San Mateo Maker Faire in May, which will be the first public appearance of the Solar Pocket Factory(come by and say hello!). All in all, it feels like we've dreamt a little bit of the future, and it's coming true. Not bad for a year's hacking.
One other thing happened this week: we figured out how to make the pocket factories cheap. Shawn and I were experimenting with different techniques for laminating and waterproofing a solar panel, and we came up with a very simple method of building a pane that produces remarkably robust, waterproof panels using only plastic film and a $30 office laminator. The simplicity of this technique means that we can make small panels that cost less per watt than large rooftop panels, on a machine that costs a couple thousand dollars, rather than millions of dollars. We love that we're able to get into the guts of solar panels and dream up new w ays to use solar in our lives, and now we're very excited about the possibility of creating simple, low-cost tools for cleantech hacking. We've been at this for a year, now, and we're just getting warmed up. More to come, very soon!
In web news, we're pleased to announce that solarpocketfactory.com is now live, combining our Pocket Pages blog, a web store for kits, high-quality solar panels and other solar hacking goods. We're looking forward to another awesome year of cleantech hacking.
Primavera
I once saw a line: "Weather's here. Wish you were beautiful." I always think of it on the first day that the spring weather warms us up.
We rode all winter, but now it's really time.
We rode all winter, but now it's really time.
Ah, The Understanding of Our Superiors
Now I understand why we can't be allowed to have guns. They know what they would do if they had them.
The mayor of Marcus Hook was charged [March 21] with holding an acquaintance hostage during a drunken encounter at his home last month that allegedly ended with the mayor’s firing a gun into the floor. During the encounter, Mayor James D. Schiliro repeatedly offered to perform a sex act with the 20-year-old male, according to police.Apparently this is one of Bloomberg's anti-gun mayors. Or was, until the website got scrubbed.
Raising them up in the way they should go
I thought Grim would appreciate this excerpt from a book I'm helping proofread at Project Gutenberg (The Doctor's Christmas Eve, by James Lane Allen, 1920):
You tell me that you have tried a method of training and that it is a failure. I don't wonder: any training would be a failure that made it the chief business in life of any creature--human or brute--to fix its mind upon what it is not to do. You say you are always warning your boys; that you fill their minds with cautions; that your arouse their imaginations with pictures of forbidden things, make them look at life as a check, a halter, a blind bridle. So far as I can discover, you have prepared a list of the evil traits of humanity and required your boys to memorize these: and then you tell them to beware. Is that it?"
"That is exactly it."
The youth lying on the grass laid aside his newspaper and began to listen. The two men welcomed his attention. The minister always found it difficult to speak without a congregation--part of which must be sinners: here was an occasion for outdoor preaching. The turfman probably welcomed this chance to get before the youth in an indirect way certain suggestions which he relied upon for his:--
"Well, that is where your training and my training differ," he resumed. "I never assemble my colts at the barn door--that is, I would not if I could--and recite to them the vicious traits of the wild horse and require them to memorize those traits and think about them unceasingly, but never to imitate them. . . . You teach [your boys] the failings of mankind as they revealed themselves in an age of primitive transgression. I say I never try to train a horse that way. On the contrary I try to let all the ancestral memories slumber, and I take all the ancestral powers and develop them for modern uses. Why, listen. We know that a horse's teeth were once useful as a weapon to bite its enemies. Now I try to give it the notion that its teeth are only useful in feeding. You know that its hoofs were used to strike its enemies: it stood on its forefeet and kicked in the rear; it stood on its hind feet and pawed in front. You know that the horse is timid, it is born timid, dies timid; but had it not been timid, it would have been exterminated: its speed was one of its means of survival: if it could not conquer, it had to flee and the sentinel of its safety was its fear; it was the most valuable trait it had; this ancestral trait has not yet been outlived; don't despise the horse for it. But now I try to teach a horse that feet and legs and speed are to serve another instinct--the instinct to win in the new maddened courage of the race-course. And I never allow the horse to believe that it has such a thing as an enemy. He is not to fear life, but to trust life. I teach him that man is not his old hereditary enemy, but his friend--and his master. I would not suggest to a horse any of its latent bad traits. I never prohibit its doing anything. I never try to teach it what not to do, but only what to do. And so I have good colts, and you have--but excuse me."
. . . "Aleck," replied the vicar of the stables with his quaint sunniness, "don't you know that no human being can teach any living thing--man or beatst or bird or fish or flea--not to do a thing? you can only teach to do. If there is a God of this universe, He is a God of doing. You can no more teach 'a not' than you can 'a nothing." Now try to teach one of your sons nothing! This world has never taught, and will never teach, a prohibition, because a prohibition is a nothing; it has never taught anything but the will and desire to do: that is the root of the matter. Do you suppose I try to keep one of my cows from kicking over the bucket of milk by tying her hind legs? I go to the other end of the beast and do something for her brain so that when she feels the instinct to kick which is her right, what I have taught her will compel her to waive her right and to keep her feet on the ground. That is all there is of it." They were hearty and good-humored in their talk, and the minister did not budge: but the boy listened only to his uncle. "Do you remember, Aleck, when you and I were in the school'over yonder and one morning old Bowles issued a new order that none of us boys was to ask for a drink between little recess and big recess? Now none of us drank at that hour; but the day after the order was issued, every boy wanted a drink, and demanded a drink, and got a drink. It was thirst for principle. Every boy knew it was his right to drink whenever he was thirsty--and even when he was not thirsty; and he disobeyed orders to assert that right. And if old Bowles had not lowered his authority before that advancing right, there would not have been any old Bowles. There is one thing greater than any man's authority, and that is any man's right. Isn't that the United States?
The Romans are going home.
Long ago, when I was young lad in the service, I heard that the Germans had a nick name for the American troops: "The Romans". Not a bad name, really--I heard they referred to the British troops as "Island Apes". I sort thought the name fit. Well, the BAOR hasn't been around for a while now, and it looks like USAREUR will soon join them.
That worked out real well last time.
Long ago, when I was young lad in the service, I heard that the Germans had a nick name for the American troops: "The Romans". Not a bad name, really--I heard they referred to the British troops as "Island Apes". I sort thought the name fit. Well, the BAOR hasn't been around for a while now, and it looks like USAREUR will soon join them.
That worked out real well last time.
Is that for real?
It's a real place, in Nevada, the Green Fly Geyser, a happy mistake:
Located on a gated parcel of private property within the million-acre Black Rock Desert, Fly Geyser is not a natural phenomenon. It was created accidentally in 1964 from a geothermal test well inadequately capped. The scalding water has erupted from the well since then, leaving calcium carbonate deposits growing at the rate of several inches per year. The brilliant red and green coloring on the mounds is from thermophilic algae thriving in the extreme micro-climate of the geysers.
The History of Philosophy "Without Gaps"
That's a bold claim, but it starts here. The podcasts seem to be bite-sized, and popularly-aimed, so that it should be accessible to anyone who wants a daily (or weekly) podcast to go with their commute, or morning coffee.
Body hacking
From Maggie's Farm, a lot of useful tricks, like how to make the room stop spinning, and how to lessen the pain of toothache.
"A Handgun Against an Army"
DL Sly sends a little something she thought I'd like, which I think some of you might like as well.
You Fight How You Train
Out in Arizona, bipartisan support destroyed a bill aimed at training the police to respect 1st Amendment rights of free expression and free association.
You can even put a Confederate flag sticker on your car, as people around here do just occasionally, even though the Confederacy waged war against the government of the United States. You can express support for utterly odious groups like the KKK. None of this justifies pulling you over, because it is within the lawful rights that the police are supposed to protect.
Nor is this simply a matter of defending abstract rights. In the current environment, encounters with the police are potentially deadly.
A handful of Arizona Senate Republicans joined with Democrats Thursday to reject a bill requiring that police be trained about the illegality of pulling over motorcyclists based solely on their clothing or the fact they're riding motorcycles.... Democrats pushed back Thursday, joined by Republican Sen. Steve Yarbrough of Chandler, who argued against creating a new class of protected people and called it the first step toward micromanaging police training.Strangely enough, it would also be illegal to pull people over just because they were otherwise-legally operating a vehicle while wearing patches indicating veteran status, or having a bumpersticker expressing political views. This is true even if the views in question are anti-government -- for example, an anti-Obama sticker, or a "I Love My Country But I Fear My Government" sticker (not necessarily a right-wing sentiment only, as Edward Abbey included a version in his collection of aphorisms).
"Are we going to indeed create a new class of protected persons, and once we do that I can suggest other groups — how about military people, how about young people, how about little old ladies with gray hair?" ...
The bill was opposed by the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, known as AzPOST, the entity that oversees police training and certification in the state
You can even put a Confederate flag sticker on your car, as people around here do just occasionally, even though the Confederacy waged war against the government of the United States. You can express support for utterly odious groups like the KKK. None of this justifies pulling you over, because it is within the lawful rights that the police are supposed to protect.
Nor is this simply a matter of defending abstract rights. In the current environment, encounters with the police are potentially deadly.
Burges urged the full Senate to pass her bill Thursday, saying she did not believe it created a protected class and saying it "is kind of frustrating when you're pulled over and somebody points a gun at you."...The Arizona Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs includes such notorious outlaws as "Bikers for Christ," "Soldiers for Jesus," and "Sober Riders MC."
"We're facing situations where they're pointing guns at our heads on a regular basis, and it's getting more intense," [Arizona Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs member] Dreyfus said. "The more often this goes on the greater the chance that somebody's going to end up dead."
Philosophy as Major
It may well be that going to graduate school is a bad investment just now, but if you are interested in it, it turns out that philosophy is a pretty good preparatory course for the usually-mandatory GRE. It is the top major for results in analytic and verbal scores, and ranks with the hard sciences in the quantitative as well.
Is the GRE a good predictor for success in other fields? Probably, if GRE scores are linked to IQ, as is sometimes assumed. Insofar as IQ measures something that is of general applicability, raising your IQ -- which is linked to learning to think about "complex relationships, elaborate systems or difficult problems" -- is a good way to raise your utility across the board. Philosophy regularly deals with all three of these things, or at least the more rigorous schools of it do.
That would suggest that it was practical exactly where it is assumed to be least practical: in asking you to struggle with arcane and abstract systems, whose applicability to the everyday is not obvious. Well, now perhaps it is obvious. It just isn't direct.
Is the GRE a good predictor for success in other fields? Probably, if GRE scores are linked to IQ, as is sometimes assumed. Insofar as IQ measures something that is of general applicability, raising your IQ -- which is linked to learning to think about "complex relationships, elaborate systems or difficult problems" -- is a good way to raise your utility across the board. Philosophy regularly deals with all three of these things, or at least the more rigorous schools of it do.
That would suggest that it was practical exactly where it is assumed to be least practical: in asking you to struggle with arcane and abstract systems, whose applicability to the everyday is not obvious. Well, now perhaps it is obvious. It just isn't direct.
I'm insulted, I think
Or maybe I'm just befuddled. North Korea apparently has just called us a "boiled pumpkin."
Yeah, and yer another.
Yeah, and yer another.
Our Enemy, Wagner
Or else our ally, as Odysseus was.
The thing I love about this article is that it provides an easy link to the particular piece of music being discussed at each instance. Read what he thinks, and then hear it; and then decide for yourself.
But listen to this, too, before you decide.
The thing I love about this article is that it provides an easy link to the particular piece of music being discussed at each instance. Read what he thinks, and then hear it; and then decide for yourself.
But listen to this, too, before you decide.
Eating for zillions, and a gold rush
Two weeks' pickings from Rocket Science, where I'm catching up after a long period indulging myself over at Project Gutenberg, and several days' worth of technical difficulties in our internet connection. (It's heck living out in the boonies.)
First, an article about the surprisingly complicated study of breast milk. It seems that a mother modifies the content of her milk in response to a variety of signals, including (possibly) the sex of her child or the
baby's having caught an infection. Also, something that caught my eye, as I'm always interested in the emerging science of the gut:
First, an article about the surprisingly complicated study of breast milk. It seems that a mother modifies the content of her milk in response to a variety of signals, including (possibly) the sex of her child or the
baby's having caught an infection. Also, something that caught my eye, as I'm always interested in the emerging science of the gut:
Some human milk oligosaccharides—simple sugar carbohydrates—were recently discovered to be indigestible by infants. When my son was nursing, those oligosaccharides weren’t meant for him. They were meant for bacteria in his gut, which thought they were delicious. My wife was, in a sense, nursing another species altogether, a species that had been evolutionarily selected to protect her child. (A relationship immortalized in the paper titled “Human Milk Oligosaccharides: Every Baby Needs a Sugar Mama.”) In effect, as Hinde and UC-Davis chemist Bruce German have written, “mothers are not just eating for two, they are actually eating for 2 × 1011 (their own intestinal microbiome as well as their infant’s)!”On a completely unrelated note, earthquakes may stimulate the formation of nearly instantaneous veins of gold. Small earthquakes can cause sudden local depressurations, with an interesting effect on fluids circulating nearby:
When mineral-laden water at around 390 °C is subjected to that kind of pressure drop, Weatherley says, the liquid rapidly vaporizes and the minerals in the now-supersaturated water crystallize almost instantly—a process that engineers call flash vaporization or flash deposition. The effect, he says, “is sufficiently large that quartz and any of its associated minerals and metals will fall out of solution”.
Easter
Then said he to Galahad: Son,
wottest thou what I hold betwixt my hands? Nay, said
he, but if ye will tell me. This is, said he, the holy dish
wherein I ate the lamb on [Holy] Thursday. And now hast
thou seen that thou most desired to see, but yet hast thou
not seen it so openly as thou shalt see it in the city of
Sarras in the spiritual place. Therefore thou must go
hence and bear with thee this Holy Vessel; for this night
it shall depart from the realm of Logris, that it shall never
be seen more here. And wottest thou wherefore? For
he is not served nor worshipped to his right by them of
this land, for they be turned to evil living; therefore I
shall disherit them of the honour which I have done them.
I owe special thanks to Dad29 today, who has been invaluable in my quest to see the cup.
White Men Are the Problem
Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.Thus writes a pair of researchers who are as insulated from reality as any two people I've ever encountered. Can you actually imagine "the public" telling a group of 'African American male leaders' that their views were not relevant, and they needed to go focus on their own culture? Of course not. The American public is so afraid of being tarred as racists that they would never react that way, for one thing; and for another, when it actually happens that there is a huge number of gun murders in the black community, as it does regularly in places like Chicago, we look to those leaders as especially relevant because of their participation in the black community. Nobody has ever suggested that they should not lecture to us about how the broader American sweep of history affects their community, or what trends from the wider society might impact the problems we'd all like to see resolved.
When these researchers go on to say, "Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out," I must assume they have somehow managed their academic careers without ever taking a course in history or literature. Aside from slavery, prejudice, imperialism, environmental damage, hate, capitalism and bigotry, I can't think of anything bad for which I've ever heard white men being especially singled out as blameworthy.
It's the common refrain on every subject. How stunning to realize that those making it apparently cannot hear themselves. Perhaps it's the fish/water issue: you can't see the sea in which you swim.
**
On the gun control/rights issue, by the way, my own native state of Georgia has recently concluded its legislative session. No new gun bills actually survived to pass, but we got close. Governor Nathan Deal was the obstacle to the passage of the bill, on terms that are very close to what we discussed here: guns would be allowed on college campuses as they are not currently (but as they are in most other public spaces), but only if permit holders took special safety training. Apparently Georgia Carry (who views the NRA as complete sellouts on gun rights) opposed the bill because it doesn't want gun rights to be entangled with any requirements or costs -- they're standing firm on "shall not be abridged."
They say Governor Deal has a "storied anti-gun record," but the governor's proposal is almost exactly the proposal I remember endorsing when we were discussing it earlier. I've long believed that the only viable response to terrorism of any sort -- including these mass shootings, which are a species of suicide terrorism except that the ideology underlying each act is usually limited to the single actor -- is to harden the broader society. However, we've allowed college campus culture to devolve into a sort of Saturnalia, especially on the weekends of home football games. Some extra steps need to be taken to ensure that the college students who assume this most adult of adult responsibilities are among the actual, and not merely statutory, adults on the campus.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen many other good recommendations on hand. I'm not immune to the idea of supporting new controls, if the controls are wise, likely to succeed, and written by people who actually understand the technology they want to regulate.
"At a Higher Rate"
Just how bad is Alaska? Well, like everything, women are hardest hit. (Probably minorities too, but the article doesn't treat that.)
So I delved a bit into the article and found the explanation, which is this bit from the fifth paragraph:
A friend of mine who teaches logic was telling me about how he hadn't had time to plan anything at all for his lecture, so he had winged it. The lecture was supposed to go for an hour, but he finished after 45 minutes. To the delight of the students, he said he was going to let them go early that day: "After all," he said, "we got through everything I'd planned, and I only expected to get through half of it."
A newly issued Alaska State Legislature report held some grim findings about women living in the Last Frontier: They earn less than men, were imprisoned at a higher rate during the past 10 years, and have a suicide rate that’s twice the national average, among other problems, including homelessness and a lack of health care.I don't mean to make light of the genuine problems mentioned here, but I was really shocked to learn that women were imprisoned at a higher rate than men these last ten years. Given the relative rates at which men and women are imprisoned, that would not just be an outlier, it would be so shocking as to demand explanation.
So I delved a bit into the article and found the explanation, which is this bit from the fifth paragraph:
As for crime and imprisonment, the number of women going to prison in Alaska is growing: In 2007, women made up 6.5 percent of Alaska’s prison population, but that number had jumped to nearly 11 percent in 2011.Oh, I see. Not "at a higher rate than men," but at a higher rate than previously.
A friend of mine who teaches logic was telling me about how he hadn't had time to plan anything at all for his lecture, so he had winged it. The lecture was supposed to go for an hour, but he finished after 45 minutes. To the delight of the students, he said he was going to let them go early that day: "After all," he said, "we got through everything I'd planned, and I only expected to get through half of it."
Hegel on the State
A striking quote in a section of the Philosophy of Right.
We should desire to have in the state nothing except what is an expression of rationality. The state is the world which mind has made for itself; its march, therefore, is on lines that are fixed and absolute. How often we talk of the wisdom of God in nature! But we are not to assume for that reason that the physical world of nature is a loftier thing than the world of mind. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity, and observe that if it is difficult to comprehend nature, it is infinitely harder to understand the stateIt is not too much to say that the more I understand Hegel, the more I understand how we got in this mess. The problem is more with those who followed him than with the man himself, but the errors of our age grew out of ground he cultivated.
A Question I Never Thought to Ask
Here's a fellow who wants you to know that your reading choices really ought to align with your fashion choices.
How surprising to learn that I've been going about it all wrong. I would promise to rethink my errors, except that I don't think I have it in me. A man's got to know his limitations.
Why do you dress the way you do, instead of in, say, boot-cut jeans and Affliction T-shirts?I've always had a form-follows-function approach to these issues. I wear a motorcycle jacket because I ride motorcycles. I often wear cowboy boots because I sometimes ride horses, and the cowboy boot's design is entirely structured by issues like the shape of the stirrup and the need for stiff leather to resist thorns. I wear a hat when it is raining, but because I now go everywhere on motorcycles, I have given up the old Stetsons for hats that can be stowed in the saddlebag when riding.
There's a certain type of character your clothing presents. I drink Scotch, play classical music, read philosophy, smoke a pipe, and these things drive a particular persona. You don't want to read Kant while wearing Aeropostale.
How surprising to learn that I've been going about it all wrong. I would promise to rethink my errors, except that I don't think I have it in me. A man's got to know his limitations.
How to deal with the government
Some satisfying suggestions from Coyote Blog. H/t Popehat, which suggests that the trick to dealing with a butthead in an organization is to find the adult in the room.
Our quiet little community is having trouble with a game warden who apparently doesn't have enough work to do making sure people don't keep undersized fish or shoot whooping cranes because they mistake them for sandhill cranes in an area where you can't shoot those, either. This fellow's mission in life for the last few years has been to end the scourge of golf-carts on sleepy little low-speed public roads on our tiny peninsula. He never actually writes tickets, believing (reasonably) that he would only be embarrassed if the residents took the matter before a local judge. The citizens are beginning to talk together about standing on their rights and insisting that he either write them a ticket or stop harassing them.
The game warden has no support for his golf-cart jihad among local law enforcement or county officials, but he is a state employee who needn't care what they think, and apparently his superiors in the state administration are unconcerned by suggestions received from both citizens and local officials. Now, however, the county commissioners have gone so far as to ask the state legislature to change the transportation code to permit golf carts in the rural areas of our county, a proposal that apparently is going to work just fine. It probably will drive the game warden crazy, but maybe he can find some frozen raspberries to obsess over. Possibly the local schools will let him arrest children who chew poptarts into the shapes of guns.
Our quiet little community is having trouble with a game warden who apparently doesn't have enough work to do making sure people don't keep undersized fish or shoot whooping cranes because they mistake them for sandhill cranes in an area where you can't shoot those, either. This fellow's mission in life for the last few years has been to end the scourge of golf-carts on sleepy little low-speed public roads on our tiny peninsula. He never actually writes tickets, believing (reasonably) that he would only be embarrassed if the residents took the matter before a local judge. The citizens are beginning to talk together about standing on their rights and insisting that he either write them a ticket or stop harassing them.
The game warden has no support for his golf-cart jihad among local law enforcement or county officials, but he is a state employee who needn't care what they think, and apparently his superiors in the state administration are unconcerned by suggestions received from both citizens and local officials. Now, however, the county commissioners have gone so far as to ask the state legislature to change the transportation code to permit golf carts in the rural areas of our county, a proposal that apparently is going to work just fine. It probably will drive the game warden crazy, but maybe he can find some frozen raspberries to obsess over. Possibly the local schools will let him arrest children who chew poptarts into the shapes of guns.
"Do Not Become The Market In An Illiquid Derivative"
I think this is a smart article (one in a series over the last week) about the London Whale.
Harden Your Hearts
Da Tech Guy titles a post about the Cyprus situation "Amazing what you can do to an unarmed populace." (H/t: InstaPundit.)
Maybe it is, but if you're going to make that stick, you'd better begin to think seriously about what will be required. We haven't begun to see this kind of thing here, but we will as we deal with our unspeakably huge fiscal crises.
Tex was saying the other day that any culture encodes lessons greater than its living members understand, so that living out the cultural mores is a way of aligning yourself with many wise and ancient lessons. Here's a part of our culture that is relevant. Start listening to the old songs. Learn the words. It will help you think about the costs, and just how much you are prepared to cede before you draw the kind of line he is talking about.
Be wise.
Maybe it is, but if you're going to make that stick, you'd better begin to think seriously about what will be required. We haven't begun to see this kind of thing here, but we will as we deal with our unspeakably huge fiscal crises.
Tex was saying the other day that any culture encodes lessons greater than its living members understand, so that living out the cultural mores is a way of aligning yourself with many wise and ancient lessons. Here's a part of our culture that is relevant. Start listening to the old songs. Learn the words. It will help you think about the costs, and just how much you are prepared to cede before you draw the kind of line he is talking about.
Be wise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."Objectivity, it turns out, is highly overrated.
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?
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.
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.
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