The politics of the cheerful

Apropos of recent discussions about both the NRA and state nullification, the Texas legislature is considering the following bill:

House Bill 1076 by state Representative Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) would prohibit any state agency or agency employee from enforcing a federal statute or regulation on firearms or firearm accessories that does not exist under Texas state law.  Any agency that violated this prohibition would not be allowed to receive state grant funds for the fiscal year in which a violation occurred.

This is only one of a raft of bills* that recently passed significant legislative hurdles in the same week when the NRA held a big rally in Houston, including proposals to eliminate criminal penalties for inadvertent display of a concealed weapon, to streamline the CHL license procedure, to penalize state agencies that post erroneous notices prohibiting the carrying of weapons, to limit the ability of private college campuses to restrict the transport of licensed firearms in students' cars, and to allow police to auction seized firearms rather than destroy them, if they can't be returned to their rightful owners.

It's nice to get cheerful political news now and then.  If you'll excuse me, I've got to go pop some corn in preparation for the kick-off of the Benghazi hearings.  To my amazement, the subject is finally getting coverage on CBS, PBS, and CNN.  Even more shocking:  on NBC and in the Washington Post.  The NewYork Times has gone so far as to publish comments from its Public Editor about whether the New York Times should be covering the story.  Much of the coverage naturally focuses on attempts by unscrupulous Republicans to politicize a story about the Obama administration's presidential campaign strategy to leave Americans to die without help overseas and then lie about it.

____________________________________________________________________
*I got the House bill information from an NRA email update, but the website is here.

Not doing nothing

The president has been doing some repair work on the fuzzy pink boundary-like area that his political enemies have unfairly read into his off-script remarks on Syria:

[I]f we say we’re taking a position, I would think at this point, the international community has a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments. . . .  I think there’d be severe costs in doing nothing. That’s why we’re not doing nothing.”

So our credibility is undiminished.  I'm glad he cleared that up.  I had been worrying that he might have been indulging himself in a little preening trash-talk that he didn't expect to be taken seriously.

NRA = IRA

Apparently some of our own fellow citizens are not as taken with the NRA.

I have seen the light. After all these years, I now agree that it’s fruitless to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are so obviously corrupt, so clearly malevolent, so bent on hurting innocent people for their own sick gain. No more due process in the clear-cut case of insidious terrorism. When the facts are so clearly before all Americans, for the whole world to see, why bother with this country’s odious and cumbersome system of justice? Send the guilty monsters directly to Guantanamo Bay for all eternity and let them rot in their own mental squalor.

No, no, no. Not the wannabe sick kid who blew up the Boston marathon or the freak that’s mailing ricin-laced letters to the president. I’m talking about the real terrorist threat here in America: the National Rifle Association.

I’m not laughing. What the NRA did last week was no laughing matter.

Are we sure Guantanamo Bay will hold another five million prisoners?

On the upside, it's better than the proposal to kill NRA members we heard earlier. At least this one does something to provide jobs! Our liberal friends have finally found an idea capable of achieving full employment: guards to watch over a vast number of political prisoners.

UKIP = NRA?

For a long time we've heard it said that the Tory party in the UK is just the Labor party in slow motion. That is, there's been a consensus about how to govern: taxes go up, freedom goes down, government grows, union with Europe proceeds. All you get to vote for is whether it happens more or less quickly.

Sounds like that consensus may be breaking up a bit.

Good for them.

This Should Be Interesting

The state legislature has passed a bill that would make it a crime for any person to attempt to implement the PP-ACA -- which is to say that, if Gov. Haley signs the bill, it will be against state law to implement Federal law. She may or may not sign it, but she's on the record as being totally opposed to implementation:

South Carolina does not want, and cannot afford, the president’s health care plan. Not now, and not ever. To that end, we will not pursue the type of government-run health exchanges being forced on us by Washington. Despite the rose-colored rhetoric coming out of D.C., these exchanges are nothing more than a way to make the state do the federal government’s bidding in spending massive amounts of taxpayer dollars on insurance subsidies that we can’t afford.

The article portrays this attempt at nullification as a "viable alternative to secession," but seeing organized resistance to the Federal government at the state level does not make secession less likely. Nullification crises also preceded the Civil War, after all, as well as other very tense moments in early American history that led to the several great compromises of the early 19th century. Another compromise might have put off, or avoided, the Civil War -- but there were some set on having their way, including not just the hot-tempered folks from South Carolina but a president, Lincoln, who was utterly sure of the rightness of his position.

Today we have both aggravating conditions as well as a law that is likely to meet nullification efforts elsewhere as well as in South Carolina. Its implementation may well prove incredibly unpopular given the vast increases in cost and taxes, and the damage it will do to people's ability to find work adequate to making a living. Congress can take no effective action to fix the problems with the law until 2015 at the earliest, and it will be 2017 before there is a chance of repeal. The Supreme Court has upheld the law, twisting themselves in a knot in attempt to find it constitutional. So the states have to be the field of action for the necessary resistance: there's no getting around that.

Well, it'll be an exciting time to be alive, anyway.

Mitt Romney Gives Democratic Advice

Mother Jones is subtly mocking him for his suggestion to new college graduates that they should begin having children as soon as is feasible, but it's the progressives who need to be rethinking their opposition to young marriage and child-rearing. More than they have yet realized, their beloved social insurance programs depend on solid families. For one thing, a married couple raising their own children is the one group least likely to drain the coffers of such programs. For another, a married couple is statistically likely to be far richer, and thus capable of paying higher taxes to support such programs. Finally, large families provide the seeds for more such families in the future -- more taxpayers, and taxpayers whose upbringing in successful marriages mean they are more likely to sustain successful marriages themselves.

The day is coming when they will no longer be able to pretend that is not so. The loudest calls for family and children will be coming from the Left: before you know it, now that the Baby Boomers have begun to retire, the young will be hearing that this is their patriotic duty.

A Finding

It's in the passive voice, but the percentages are about equal to those who felt the same way in, say, 1775.

May Day

The joys of spring and the greenwood to you, as we enter the cathedral of May.

Prison Couldn't Happen To A More Deserving Couple

It's rare to see our justice system produce so poetic a result.

“Your statement that I have disgraced my judgeship is true. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.”

The two judges face up to seven years in prison under a plea agreement made with the state.

If the result were fully poetic, of course, they would not have been offered a plea deal. They'd be railroaded into prison for an excessive period of time, having been kept away from legal representation. They benefit from the prosaic concerns of justice that they so often denied to others, in order to enrich themselves.

More amazing music

At AVI.

Democracy May Have Had Its Day

So argues a hero of the academy, in his final hour.

Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in "Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law.

In just the last few weeks I have come to a realization about the way the Founders structured our system of government. As we have discussed here many times, Aristotle argued that there were three basic forms of government, each of which could become perverted by self-interest among the ruling class. Each of the three had characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The three forms of government are rule-by-one, rule-by-few, and rule-by-many: you can call them monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. If the monarch comes only to care about his own thoughts and interests, he becomes a tyrant; the aristocracy, an oligarchy; and the polity, on Aristotle's terms, a democracy.

What I've realized very recently is that the Founders took some pains to give us all three forms of government. It isn't just that the branches of government have checks and balances. It is that they are different forms of government, on just Aristotle's terms. The Congress is a polity (or democracy). It is popularly elected, and enacts decisions by majority rule. It is susceptible to both the goods and the harms of rule-by-many.

The judiciary is an aristocracy (or oligarchy). It is built around an elite class with barriers to entry. It has the strengths and the weaknesses of rule-by-few.

The executive is essentially a monarchy (or tyranny). One man dominates it, selects its leaders, and orders its functions. It has all the potential benefits and hazards of rule-by-one.

What the Founders did was to give us a system that not only checked three branches with three separate functions against one another. They also provided us with a system in which the three basic kinds of government were all present, and counterbalanced. We could get every good Aristotle saw in every system; and when one branch went bad, there was the hope that the competing interests of the other forms of government might right it.

It was a good idea. There is only one problem, and it is one Aristotle did not consider: the problem of scale. More and more, I think a government must adhere to a human scale in order to be just. I mean by "a human scale" that maximum set of people such that the members can all know one another, and care about one another. At levels beyond this, a fundamental aspect of humanity is lost: we don't love each other any more, and are content to treat the unloved members as less than the beloved ones.

Whether such a government can practically exist on earth, I do not know: much of that depends on the difficulty of being able to defend yourself against the other humans outside the order, who do not love you in any case. Unless we find a way to achieve it, though, I cannot imagine a society that will escape Jefferson's requirement: that of periodic overthrow and replacement, in order to keep the tree of liberty hale.

The worldwideweb

We lost our internet connection briefly this morning, which deprived me of access to essential information like this:



Update:  I guess that first link was broken.  This one is from YouTube, and should inspire you to check out the other offerings from these total nutcases.

Long 'Ere We Came to the Streets of Aberdeen

In the comments to one of Tex's posts, I mentioned having dinner last night with an older gentleman who had been in Iraq as a British soldier just about fifty years before I was there. He is of English origin, but at one point he had spent significant time teaching in Aberdeen. The Scots of Aberdeen, he said, feel about the same way about their English visitors as Southerners do about Yankees.

He told a story to illustrate the point. An Englishman is driving north from Edinburgh toward Aberdeen, when he comes to a fork in the road. The signpost pointing to the left fork reads "Aberdeen, 30 miles," and the sign on the right fork reads the same thing. Puzzled, he pulls off to ponder the situation until he sees an old Scot working his field.


Grim faces a similar dilemma.
The Englishman gets out of the car and steps over to where the Scot is laboring, and calls down to him from the road. "Excuse me, good man," he says, "but does it make any difference which road I take to Aberdeen?"

The Scot ponders the question in a dark silence for a moment. Then he replies, "Nae ta me!"

Kicking the anthill

Minor excitement in my neighborhood this morning as a fellow who was either off the right meds or on the wrong ones gave several people the alarmed creeps over the course of the morning.  He ultimately followed my next-door neighbor right up to her house, making inappropriate conversation, and increasing the "eww" factor by choosing to take off his shirt as they approached the door.  She went inside, locked the door, armed herself, and called for help.  Presently her husband and his co-worker arrived (armed) to block off our "loop" on both ends, while various other neighbors ventured out (armed) to see what was up, the phone tree having reached most nearby households by that time.  Two sheriff's deputies arrived to take him into custody at about the time more distant neighbors started driving up (armed) to look into something they'd heard on the scanner.

Once he'd been hauled off, my neighbor's husband came home to hear the details from her.  When she got to the part about the guy taking off his shirt, her husband's face assumed a dead-eyed expression I'd never seen on it before.  He's normally the most amiable of fellows.  His face made me want to back up a step.

We get the occasional passers-through who irritate us mildly by loitering on our loop for the apparent purpose of drinking a six-pack and dumping the cans before driving home, or perhaps waiting for a chance to ditch an old appliance rather than spend the time or money necessary to leave it at the dump.  We invite them to clear out, but we don't go ape.  This guy didn't do or say anything overtly threatening.  Nevertheless, he punched every button we own, inducing that atavistic reaction of "snake.  Kill it."  The sheriff's deputies were giving his truck and his person a thorough searching the last I saw.  If he was carrying, he picked the wrong way to call attention to himself.

More rituals that bind

A friend's father died a few days ago.  It was not a tragic death; he was very old, had been miserably ill for years, and badly missed his wife of 57 years, who died a couple of years back.  He got a proper send-off yesterday.  A preacher spoke briefly and to the point.  We sang hymns.  The Masons conducted their elaborate, touching ceremony, then an honor guard of Marines from Corpus Christi delivered a 21-gun salute, folded the flag properly for delivery to our friend, and finished up with a very fine "Taps."  The Masons put on a lunch for the visiting family.

Ray Brashears joined the Navy in 1944, then again in 1945, having been ousted the first time when they discovered he was only 17 years old.  He served in the Bikini Islands during the atomic testing there and was one of the few surviving members of that cohort.  He settled in our neighborhood in 1974, which by local standards made him quite the old timer.  He left nine great-grandchildren.

Television News

As most of you know, Grim's Hall has been without television since 2006 -- originally as a cost-saving measure, and later because we found we didn't miss it. I didn't have a lot of time for television before that, and one reason it made so little impact on us was that we were always too busy to watch it anyway. I mostly used it to watch old movies that happened to be on late in the evening as I was winding down for bed, but that can be done more cheaply in many ways. In addition I've often been out of the country, in places where television wasn't necessarily available or in English.

For these reasons I've been largely immune to many of the worst trends afflicting society these last twenty years: reality television, the general decline of standards of obscenity, the general rise of libertine standards on displays of sexuality. But I had thought I was more or less engaged with the news, because I keep up with the news carefully as a citizen ought to do.

These last few days have disabused me of that notion. Visiting a relative in the hospital, I've been exposed to television news as it is now done on both local and cable networks. I am appalled.

We used to watch the news at home when I was a boy, and I remember that it was nearly always bad. But I don't remember the obsessive focus on getting and displaying footage of those whom the overwhelming force of tragedy has momentarily turned to screaming, crying, emotional wrecks. At some point the news has become genuinely wicked, preying on disaster for the pure voyeuristic pleasure of seeing a human being reduced to an animal.

This is horrifying and shameful. I dread to consider what it says about our culture.

All's not lost in the world of architecture

A collection of weird architecture.  Most of these are great. Not crazy about the hotel in Dubai. Two are by Gaudi, just about my favorite architect.

 

Eggshells

If you've ever raised chickens, you know how long the eggs stay fresh in their shells even without refrigeration.  Some clever people are working on a genetic trick to get vaccines to form their own calcium shells so they can more easily reach remote populations lacking refrigeration.

H/t Rocket Science.

My kind of bishop

I'm amazed Grim hasn't posted about this yet.

Update: Hey, c'mon! No one likes this story? It's got it all: damsel in distress, neighborhood comes together instead of going all Kitty Genovese, and a Mormon bishop is a full-on Ninja hero with a sword. Definitely not what the bad guy expected.

Eric Blair's Problem on Display

A few places, really.

Assumptions

In his ongoing quest to give migraines to Cassandra, James Taranto has written again about women and the workplace. His argument isn't the one that interests me, though, but the one to which he is responding.

The headline is a grabber: "Female Ivy League Graduates Have a Duty to Stay in the Workforce." In the piece itself, Goff actually stops well short of endorsing that position wholeheartedly. She acknowledges that "most sane and fair people can agree that any woman has the right to make whatever choice she believes is best for her family--whether that is choosing to stay home full-time or work outside of the home," but in the same sentence she suggests that "women have a definite responsibility to make choices for the good of all women, such as putting an elite degree to use outside of the home."

Similarly, Goff disavows the belief "that every woman should be made to feel as though [she] must choose between being committed to [her] children or committed to the sisterhood of women's advancement," then in the next sentence affirms that a woman with a Harvard Law School degree who forgoes a lengthy professional career has "wasted" an "opportunity."

What I'm curious about is this assumption by Goff that women in the workplace can be assumed to be, even in part, doing something that advances "the good of all women." That could be true, but why ought it to be assumed?

There are lots of men who get degrees from Ivy League schools, but it has never occurred to me to think that their degrees do me (or men generally) any good. In fact, the opposite is true: men ordinarily think of other men as competition, and so a man obtaining an advanced degree from a school with a high reputation means that my opportunities are in a certan sense going to decrease, not increase. This is because any job that we might compete for he is more likely to obtain, given the respect his credentials will enjoy.

That is not necessarily true, of course: he could use the knowledge gained while seeking his degree to start a business that could employ me, and that would increase my opportunities. But entrepreneurs don't usually require advanced degrees, let alone from famous schools: given the expense of obtaining such a credential, most seekers understandably put it to use in competition for positions in government, finance, or in universities. That's where the big advantages of high starting pay favor them most. So normally, then, a man (or a woman) who gets an Ivy League degree is occupying a space that is then not available for others to occupy.

Of course, there's a sense in which whatever they do (apart from government), they're contributing to an economy whose expansion increases opportunities for everyone. But if you're a man (or woman) who wants a job, the less competition the better -- and the fewer people with Ivy League degrees seeking the job you want, the more likely you will get it.

Now, Goff might be arguing that women have a duty to get into positions to hire and promote women; but of course discriminating in favor of women is illegal, so surely she doesn't mean to advocate for that. After all, a business who made it a policy to hire and promote only or especially men would be in danger of large lawsuits. Certainly she can't be advocating for women who obtain such positions to put their company at risk. That would be a violation of their duty to their employers.

It used to be said that women being present at all in a job opened opportunities for women, simply because getting their first made the point that women could do it. Surely, though, that is at least a generation past: there aren't any jobs left in the economy that women don't do, except the ones they don't choose to do. We haven't had a female President, but not because anyone thinks we couldn't possibly have one: rather, it is only because Democrats in 2004 preferred then-Senator Obama to then-Senator Clinton. If she had won the Democratic primary that year, it is all but certain she would have been elected to the Presidency.

So maybe Goff's assumption is outdated. It could be the mark of a true equality if women began to regard other women with advanced degrees the same way they think of the men who compete with them: as competitors out for their own good, and if hired, the good of their employer. Expecting them to help you is an expectation misplaced. Not only will they probably not, they probably ought not. Their duties in the market lie elsewhere.

Lars Walker's Problem On Display

The very issue that I had wanted to discuss, in Lars Walker's Hailstone Mountain, is on display today in TIME Magazine.

It's an attractive view. An educated and thoughtful man wrote it.

The little girl smiled. "Nobody hurts anybody anymore."

There are worse things than this in the world, I thought.

There are, aren't there?

From Jim Geraghty:

From the Daily Caller: The bill Rubio has been pushing isn't as bad as you might have expected. For one thing:

Congressional Democrats wanted Obamacare exchanges to cover all immigrants.  However, in addition to putting all illegal immigrants who legalize under the same constraints as legal immigrants with regard to benefit-seeking (i.e., they are legally barred from seeking or receiving welfare), the immigration bill also prevents access to Obamacare.  As Sen. Marco Rubio said on Fox News Sunday, “[T]hey don’t qualify for any federal benefits….  This is an important point.  No federal benefits, no food stamps, no welfare, no Obamacare.  They have to prove they’re gainfully employed.  They have to be able to support themselves, so they’ll never become a public charge.”  This is a point on which President Obama was forced to concede, and a make-or-break point from conservatives’ standpoint.

That's what I call visiting the sick

Maybe the greatest morale boost these two ever got.

Update: I forgot to credit Bookworm Room.

Scotty pinwheel

Hailstone Mountain: A Review & Invitation for Discussion

Like several of you, I have purchased Lars Walker's newest work, Hailstone Mountain. I finally had time to finish reading it last night, and after reflection I wanted to offer a review. Since I know that I am not the only one among us to have read it, it's also a good opportunity for us to discuss it in the comments below.

Two things I thought the book did exceptionally well. The first is in the early chapters, when Erling is cursed and must show his heroic nature in a very different way: by struggling to eat though it is painful, and by accepting the shaving of his head. This is done so that he can look like a slave, but with all the connotations of loss of hair -- loss of beauty, loss of identity, and with a nod toward Samson, a recognition of his loss of that physical strength that is characteristic of the hero. These are clear analogues for the kind of courage that is required of those who fall victim to cancer, and other severe illnesses of the body. So much is lost, and so much must be borne. Those who manage to come through this without surrendering their dignity of soul are indeed demonstrating a kind of high heroism, though it is one difficult to portray in a novel of the sort that people find pleasant to read. I thought that was well done.

Even more than that, I liked the way in which Father Ailill struggles with the violence of creation. There's a comforting answer given toward the end, but for the most part the book looks in the face the strength that death has been given in the world. It is a difficult theological problem, and it is good to see a religious figure represented as treating it with the severity of mind that it deserves.

One thing that I wish to raise -- not as a criticism, but as a point of theological discussion, because I think I can see two viable arguments here -- is a point Mr. Walker also raises in Troll Valley. As you remember, toward the end of that book a mysterious figure in town comes to speak before the local Lutheran church, and he speaks on the Pharisees.

"We get a bad picture of the Pharisees from the gospels, but I think we miss the point.... The Pharisees were the best and wisest of Israel. I do not say that in irony.... I do not say Jesus was a Pharisee. But it is a fact that he agreed with them in many things. As to why He condemned them, the answer to that is a hard one. It is found in Hebrews 12:6 -- 'For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.' Christ wasted little time on the Sadducees. Their souls had long since been sold. But for the Pharisees He had hopes, I think, and so He argued with them, hammer and tongs, for three years. The Pharisees were lovers of the Law.... and like many kinds of lovers, certain kinds of parents... they way they chose to love only smothered the Object of their love." (There aren't page numbers in the Kindle book, but this is 92% through the work.)

So in Troll Valley, Christ argues with those whom he loves best -- even the ones who do not lay down the Law and follow him as disciples. They are wrong, but they are almost right -- they are trying to be right -- and yet that means they are still completely wrong.

In Hailstone Mountain, we have an interesting variation on the same problem. Now the speaker is Christ himself, coming to Father Ailill in a vision:

"Do you know what the greatest enemy of the good is?... [T]he greatest enemy of the good is the almost-good. The thing that is nearly true but not quite. The almost-good brings men to damnation at the least cost."

This is wrapped up with the meditation on how Jesus came to send not peace but a sword, and it is nicely done. The almost-good has managed to bring actual peace and safety to a community. People have laid down their weapons, and children can travel freely and in safety even across the river to hear the popular public sermons. The people don't hurt each other any more. There is real peace.

What Christ wants Ailill to do is to destroy that peace, because it is based upon lies and an unjust bargain. He wants Ailill to restore -- indeed, to very much heighten -- the violence and destruction, so that most of these people living in peace will be killed at war. That is the narrow road.

This is a hard problem, and it is a good problem. Good problems are very good things to have. You can burnish your mind and your soul by rubbing against them.

So rather than taking the problem away from you, I'll ask you to tell me what you think about it. Let's share the problem together.

On Marriage

A commentary on the recent funeral of Baroness Thatcher mentioned that the presiding priest had given an excellent address at the royal wedding. It's about seven minutes long, but it's one of the most insightful brief speeches on the subject I can recall having heard. I trust the young couple was -- as I was on my own wedding day -- far too excited to understand or remember any of the sermon. It was for them in a way, but perhaps it was more for us.

Treasure boxes

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica I'm working on now at Project Gutenberg (we're up to the S's!):

SAFES, STRONG-ROOMS AND VAULTS. . . . Although it is practically certain that boxes provided with locks or coffers must have followed closely on the development of locks (q.v.) and been in use in ancient Egypt, yet no examples remain to us of earlier date than the middle ages.  The earliest examples extant were constructed of hard wood banded with hammered iron, and subsequent development took place rather on artistic than on practical lines up to the time of the introduction of boxes entirely of iron.  On the continent of Europe the iron box was developed to a very high standard of artistic beauty and craftsmanship, but with no real increase of security.  Several specimens of these coffers supposed to be of 17th-century workmanship are preserved in the museum at Marlborough House.  Cast-iron chests seem to have been made in various parts of Great Britain in the early part of the 19th century, but the use of wrought iron was probably confined to London until 1820, or thereabouts, when the trade spread to Wolverhampton.

Attention then shifted to making them fireproof, and later to making them more burgle-proof. There were great improvements in both areas, but they were never as beautiful again.

 

Better than the way we had

We don't need the ladies cryin' 'cause the story's sad.

Another blow to warmenisticals

I hope this isn't going to interfere with Al Gore's retirement planning.

Revolution

The "Les Mis" flash mob gag has spread so wide you can find dozens of YouTube examples.  They don't always have great voices, and when they do, sometimes the gag doesn't quite work, or the sound quality is bad.  This one in Polish really works, and who needs the words, anyway, after the darn thing was on Broadway for 20 years and just won Oscars in movie form?



This is a good twist.



I could be made completely happy by someone pulling a flash mob on me.

Sad song part deux

Those of you who've had quite enough shape-note music from me lately ought not to click on this one.



Just so everyone will know, I'd like that performed at my funeral.  So if I die, get right to work learning all four parts.

Here's one much more cheerful:

The Brotherhood of Volunteers

My father sends:

"Texas brothers standing guard over the fallen in West."



This is how it was of old. Do you remember how much attention the Greeks before Troy, or the Trojans themselves, gave to guarding the bodies of their fallen? These are the opening lines of the Iliad: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures[.]"

But not if we watched, and held the field, that honor might be done to them instead. That was the force of the last chapters of the Iliad, when Priam came to beg Achilles for the right to bury his son, and when that burial was done with all honor. Do we remember these things? Perhaps it does not matter that we remember, so long as we still do.

Suspect in custody.

That's it, 7:45 Central.

Sad songs

The news has me down.



I recognize many faces in that crowd.  The fellow in the middle in one-quarter view is Gaylon Powell, a good friend and a mainstay of Sacred Harp in Texas for decades.


God of my life, look gently down, 
Behold the pain I feel; 
But I am dumb before Thy throne, 
Nor dare dispute Thy will. 

 I’m but a sojourner below, 
As all my fathers were; 
May I be well prepared to go, 
When I the summons hear. 

But if my life be spared awhile, 
Before my last remove, 
Thy praise shall be my business still,
And I’ll declare Thy love.

                           --Isaac Watts, 1719

No mealy mouth here

When was the last time you heard such a cogent and devastating speech from an American politician?

Warm welcomes

In what one commentator at Maggie's Farm correctly identifies as "the therapeutic approach to evil," NPR ran radio interviews this morning with Cambridge deep-thinkers explaining that "this is what happens when we're not welcoming enough to immigrants."  As another commenter mused, it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the MSM had been able to fulfill their fond dreams of pinning this thing on a Tea Partier.  "This is what happens when we're not welcoming enough to conservatives?"

"Reports of my death. . . ."

What happens to a Reuters staffer who inadvertently publishes a decidedly unflattering canned obituary about an unimaginably wealthy, ruthless political operative . . . just a bit before the fellow is quite dead and harmless?

Plant safety

Almost as soon as the news hit about the explosion in West, Texas, reports agreed that anhydrous ammonia was involved, and I began hearing how dangerous it is to let water get near the stuff.  Here is a very brief CNN interview explaining that a plant of this sort generally is considered very safe, but apparently there was a small fire, then firehoses, then . . . .

Not using firehoses near the anhydrous ammonia tanks doesn't seem to have been part of the emergency plan for the plant or the town.  There are reports that the EPA was unhappy with the place in 2006, but it was a minor problem about having an emergency plan on file that was quickly remedied to the EPA's satisfaction.  OSHA hasn't been onsite since 1985.

The plant is nestled among homes, schools, and a nursing home, but it originally was out in the country.  The very small town grew up around it in apparent ignorance of the danger.  The head of the local EMS reports that he was conducting some kind of training at the nursing home the night of the explosion.  Although he didn't explain exactly what he feared might happen, somehow he got the idea he'd better move the residents to the far side of the building, which he'd just about finished doing when the plant blew.  Even so, the roof came down on them.  He looked pretty beat up on camera, and couldn't account for most of his personnel.

I'm familiar with the 1947 Texas City blast, naturally, growing up in Houston, but was surprised to read about a worse one in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, which leveled two-and-a-half square kilometers.  Two thousand people were killed, including many spectators who were lined up on the haborfront watching a fire in a munitions ship stuffed with TNT.  The ship had been struck in harbor by a Belgian relief vessel.

Rituals bind

I like the way the crowd took over from the professional singer, with his encouragement.  (The anthem is after the pop-music photo montage, at about 1:30.)



Those bombers must have felt like germs with a whole body's white blood cells after them.  At least one probably still does.

H/t HotAir.

The Tupelo Mississippi Flash

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:

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 Smell of Gunsmoke in the Evening

Bad day at Black Rock for gun control bills in the Senate.

Some appropriate music:

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:

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.

Anyone With A Wife Will Understand This Video

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.

Boston

I don't want to say much about Boston until there are facts to discuss, but I do agree with PowerLine here. It is good to see citizens doing a citizen's duty, spontaneously rising to the challenge of helping one another. This is part of what keeps us free.

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!

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.

Things journalists should know

The worm is turning:

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:

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.

For Cassandra

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?

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Now That's Interesting...

The FAA has established a "no fly zone" over the recent Arkansas oil spill.

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.

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.

"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

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).

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."...

"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."

The Arizona Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs includes such notorious outlaws as "Bikers for Christ," "Soldiers for Jesus," and "Sober Riders MC."

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.)

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 state

It 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.

Why do you dress the way you do, instead of in, say, boot-cut jeans and Affliction T-shirts?

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.

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.

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.

Lessons

It's not true, as some say, that our schools have lost the ability to inculcate knowledge.

"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.