Ich bin ein RPI

Not the literal kind, which is a "Registered Provisional Immigrant" as defined under the new comprehensive but incomprehensible Senate proposal to combine open borders with a welfare state.  Nevertheless, I'm one of the new army of workers who can be hired without subjecting my employer to the choice of either providing me with expensive health care coverage or paying a hefty Obamacare fine.  That's because I adopt the quaint old technique of using my own wages to pay for my own health care.  Starting soon, unless the House blows this thing up, many workers formerly known as illegal immigrants will join me in this enviable state and discover its competitive advantage.  Maybe we'll see people renounce their citizenship and come back over the border.

Ted Cruz tried to address this quirk yesterday, but found the subject too hot for inclusion in the floor debate.  From his website:

Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up.  Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up.  Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem.  If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants.

It's only fair, I guess. They need the jobs more than we do.  Besides, this isn't the first legislative initiative that's been eagerly adopted despite it's inarguable tendency to drive up unemployment.  If more people are thrown out of work, we can buy their votes all the more readily with unemployment benefits.

Way to go!

Chinese postal workers think fast and break the fall of a toddler from an upstairs window.

A blow against prejudice

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 (Roberts, C.J., joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito):

The Fifteenth Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.  To serve that purpose, Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.

The Court struck down the Voting Rights Act's singling out of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, in addition to a few counties and municipalities in other states, as political units so likely to engage in ruses to prevent blacks from voting that they cannot be permitted to alter even the most trivial aspects of their voting procedures without pre-clearance from the federal Justice Department. This marks an end to pre-empt redistricting proposals and voter i.d. laws in the states the powers-that-be love to hate, though it still will be possible to sue to change procedures after the fact if the procedures can be demonstrated to violate the Voting Rights Act, according to standards that apply equally to all states.

The Court did not directly strike down the "pre-clearance" section (Section 5) but the section that sets out the formula for maintaining the permanent list of enemy states (Section 4).  The Government admitted that the formula was reverse-engineered; it identified the miscreants and then dreamed up a formula that would snag them.  The Court felt that any attempt to identify evil states should be based on current information, not 50-year-old grudges.  Whether or not the Justice Department has noticed, voter registration and voting patterns have reached something very close to parity in the states previously identified as hopelessly racist.

Maybe the Justice Department will have time now to consider the prevalent of racism in other contexts.  Not to mention important issues of transgender discrimination.  Is there room to hope they'll address the abuse of bureaucratic discretion to target the politically unsound?  As long as we're worrying about equal protection under the laws and all that.

Police State, part whatever number I'm up to now:

Radley Balko has an interesting observation on Police culture:

"What Cop T-shirts Tell Us About Police Culture"

When I was a child, you'd never have seen stuff like this.

The Death of Democracy

This article is right about a whole lot.

The post-monopoly world

I'm enjoying Kevin D. Williamson's new book, "The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome," a proposition from the cheerful end of the TEOTWAWKI spectrum.   Williamson begins with these questions:

Why is it that the [iPhone] in my pocket gets better and cheaper every year, but many of our critical institutions grow more expensive and less effective?  Why does the young Bengali immigrant [who served me coffee this morning while using her own iPhone] have access to the same communication technology enjoyed by men of great wealth and power, but at the same time she must send her children to inferior school, receive inferior health care, and age into an inferior retirement?  And how is it that Apple can make these improvements while generating so much profit that one of its most serious corporate challenges is managing its "cash mountain"--about $100 billion at this writing, and headed toward $200 billion by some estimates--whereas government at all levels is running up enormous debts to fund stagnating or declining services?

The author's thesis is that monopolies always crumble, to be replaced by smaller units whose performance improves under competition, and that governments follow this same trajectory.  I'm curious to see if he can make it stick.

The Tragedy Is They'll Never Understand

Via DL Sly, a gaffe. That's what we call this kind of thing these days. But it's not a gaffe, not really. It's a massive philosophical error. It's a failure to understand the facts of the world. I wonder after it. I do.

Political economy

Another from Maggie's Farm: Wow, sugar policy is hard. I think it's about supporting domestic sugar growers so they can make sure we don't suffer a critical shortage in case we're embargoed. But then there's that whole problem of sugar being the white poison. I wonder if we shouldn't take a page out of Pennsylvania's prohibition-era approach, which is to make a nightmare out of the process of buying liquor, and nationalize the sugar industry to the same effect. That way we could subsidize profits to compliant crony capitalists, employ lots of people in secure jobs with good benefits at taxpayer expense, and limit the sugar intake of a vulnerable populace while balancing the federal budget by eliminating obesity and diabetes. We can probably find a way to make cars run on sugar, too, if we make gasoline expensive enough.

The Right and the Wrong Way to Learn About Your Ancestors

Two new works on Medieval sexuality have been brought to my attention in recent days. I'm going to bring them to yours, because they exemplify two very different approaches to understanding the past. One of them is good. One of them is so wrong I almost don't know where to begin explaining why.

Let's start with the bad one: Ogling Ladies: Scopophilia in Medieval German Literature. Here's a description of the approach and findings.

"Successfully applies modern psychoanalytic theory to analysis of medieval texts in a creative way..." The love of looking, or scopophilia, is a common motif among female figures in medieval art and literature where it is usually expressed as a motherly or sexually interested gaze—one sanctioned, the other forbidden. Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors. Setting the motif against the period’s dominant patriarchal ethos and its almost exclusive pattern of male authorship, Summers argues that the maternal gaze was endorsed as a stabilizing influence while the erotic gaze was condemned as a threat to medieval order.

So we are interpreting what the Medievals were doing according to a completely modern form of analysis, which functions as a kind of meat grinder that produces findings in the shape that the grinder itself is designed to produce. If you apply Freudian analysis to the ancient Greeks, you won't get a picture that looks much like Homer, but you'll get one that looks a lot like Freud.

Unsurprisingly, then, we discover what our modern thinker expected to find: a deep fear of female sexuality, and a forbidding refusal to permit its expression.

Now let's look at the good approach. Why not just translate the poetry and read it?

The poems, many with unprintable names, offer a glimpse into the Middle Ages that has nothing to do with courtly love, warring knights or church teachings. Instead they show cuckolded husbands, randy priests, lusty women—and a fondness for scatological humor....

These racy poems shed light on the lives of regular people in medieval times. "This shows the common people being as down and dirty as you can get. It will change people ideas about the Middle Ages as dark and church-bound and unknowable," says Mr. Bloch....

"The Fisherman of Pont-Sur-Seine," exemplifies the power negotiations between a man and wife, says Mr. Dubin. In the tale, a wife loves having sex with her fisherman husband, but tells her husband otherwise, so as not to seem crass. To prove that his wife is lying, the fisherman happens upon a dead priest in the river and cuts off his genitals. He presents them to his wife as his own, saying that knights attacked him. Furious, the wife readies to leave him. When she reaches into his pocket to take money for her trip, she realizes he's lying and flings her arms around him, happy again. The fisherman is pleased to have made his point.

Both of these books have Medieval sexuality as their subject, but only one of them is really a book about the people of the Middle Ages.

More fun with climate

De hot come go, come go. H/t Maggie's Farm.

Against Catholic Schools

Apparently our President doesn't approve of Catholic education. Well, American public schools produced the Lightworker. What have Catholic schools ever produced to compare with that? Naught but a few saints.

Really, these remarks are incredibly offensive. They are not, however, surprising. The drive to push religion our of the public space, and force it to hide itself inside churches and private homes, has been going on for about fifty years. Nobody much over thirty approves of it, most of them in the Northeast; in the South the ban on prayer in school is about as popular as the IRS (but still more popular than Congress!).

Religious toleration is a great good, but not anti-religious sentiment. The public space needs more saints, not fewer.

PC sex

From Dr. Joy Bliss at Maggie's Farm, about sexual harassment panic in the military:

The PC attitude seems to be to overstimulate children, but to de-sexualize adults.  Or de-sexualize heterosexual adults, anyway.  Does that make sense?

306° NW, 2027 Romeo

So let it be recorded in the Book of the Day.

Tea Party v. IRS

Guns are scary

Ted Cruz recently asked, "Anyone know if President Obama intends to perform background checks on the Syrian rebels before providing them weapons?"

I wonder if there's a way to trace the weapons after we turn them loose in Syria? Some kind of i.d. we could check if we later find them at the scene of a crime.

Olympics Committee announces new gymnastics event

Mental pretzels.  What do you do when the facts contradict your models?

(1)  Create new models that find hypothetical facts hiding in the historical record, now that they can't be measured directly.

(2)  Explain that your model always allowed for the possibility that warming would plateau out; the deniers were just too dumb to see it when they looked at all those smooth, upward curves in the graphs you used to justify hugely expensive political proposals.  (The words "monotonic increase" are starting to show up in comment threads.  Only an unscientific idiot would have expected something so crass and un-nuanced as a monotonic increase.)

(3)  Dream up places the warming could be hiding, because you know it's there somewhere.  Unless it didn't come in in the first place, which is possible, but don't talk about that in front of reporters, who are always looking for the kind of simplistic prediction that is suitable for a news cycle, not to mention for supporting hugely expensive political proposals.

(4)  Explain that, as your understanding of climate increases, it becomes so complex that it's unfair to expect you to make accurate predictions.  Isn't that what always happens when your understanding deepens?  Your ability to predict results goes right down the tubes.

(5)  If all else fails, explain that greenhouse warming is obviously the strongest variable in climate, because what else could possibly explain how much warmer it is on Venus than here?

Wait, isn't Venus closer to a mysterious potential source of thermal energy?  As the soberly intense scientist says in disaster movies:  "This effect can't be explained so easily, Mr. President.  It would have to be coming from something huge -- something approximately the size of our own Sun."

Booze, public and private

This post isn't about discrete drunkenness (like Ron White's complaint when he was accused of public drunkenness:  "I didn't want to be drunk in public.  I wanted to be drunk in a bar.  They threw me into public").  Instead, it's about confusion over the best way to supply customers with the liquor they want (and are legally entitled) to buy and consume.  One way, long the norm in Pennsylvania, is to give the state a monopoly on liquor sales.  That approach avoids the evils of competition and ensures stable jobs for 5,000 public union members.  It also ensures that the number and size of stores will be entirely divorced from public demand, that prices and selection will be lousy, and that there will be a thriving smuggling operation across nearby state lines, which promotes the stability of a lot of jobs for public-union policemen.

So if the main purpose of the liquor-distribution system is to create public jobs, it's going splendidly.  But if the idea is to bring suppliers and consumers of liquor together in a mutually satisfactory way, things aren't so great.  Change is afoot, however:  Pennsylvania's state legislature is dominated by Republicans, who predictably are pushing a scheme to privatize the liquor stores.  Those nutty Republicans!  The idea is that people who want to sell alcohol will get together with people who want to buy it in stores at mutually agreeable prices, with competition among stores to attract interested buyers.  These anarchists want anyone who can get a heavily regulated liquor license to be able to sell any liquor they like to anyone who can prove he's of legal age.  Stores will be able to stock and sell any liquor they like, not just brands on the state's approved list.

The notion that any job losses by union workers would be more than offset by all the new, private liquor stores that would have to start hiring as they start their businesses from scratch and expand to fill the pent-up demand?  That's just crazy talk:

Most of the licenses under Turzai’s plan would go to Walmart, Costco, Target, and other big box and chain stores that would reallocate current shelf space and use their current employees to stock the shelves.  That’s just what happened in other states, and it would happen here.

Every time the private sector expands, it's sucking the life-blood out of the public sector, and besides, those private-sector employers are all about profit, which is the very antithesis of employment.

For those who aren't yet convinced that the Republicans' plan is a job-killer, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is running an ad pointing out the substantive evils of the capitalist approach:   a 30-second spot that features the sad internal dialogue of a little girl who's just lost her father to a drunk driver.  This isn't as bizarre a line of argument as it sounds, considering the milieu.  According to Wikipedia,

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) . . . was established in conjunction with the 21st Amendment and the repeal of prohibition.  In 1933, just four days before the sale of alcohol became legal in Pennsylvania, the Board was officially organized.  Upon its creation, Governor Gifford Pinchot stated that the purpose of the Board was to "discourage the purchase of alcoholic beverages by making it as inconvenient and expensive as possible."

The private sector will never be able to match that performance.

Good Dog

Once in a while, it's good to wash your boots in the sea.  Apparently, also your dog.

Colt always belonged to Texas, anyway

Samuel Walter, the Texas Ranger who did more than anyone else to make the Colt revolver synonymous with Texas and the Wild West, supposedly uttered these last words in 1847 upon receiving his mortal wound near Vera Cruz, during the war with Mexico:  “I am gone, boys.  Never surrender! Never surrender!  Hand me my six-shooter.”

He meant, of course, his Colt six-shooter, produced in the Connecticut factory of the extraordinary Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolving firearm mechanism that automatically revolved the cylinder upon the cocking of the hammer, and locked it in place.  This new design permitted the user to fire repeatedly without reloading.   (Previous gunsmiths had used some version of a revolving cylinder as early as the 17th century, and 19th-century Boston inventor Elisha Collier had patented a revolving flintlock firing mechanism for muskets and rifles, but the approach became practical only with Colt's innovation.)

There is a persistent, but apparently completely unfounded, local tradition that Samuel Colt is buried here in our tiny community of Lamar in Aransas County.  Despite his deep connection to Texas, it seems he never came here; his early Texian promoters all traveled to Connecticut to do business with him.  Colt has quite a prominent burial monument in his hometown of Hartford, where he died in 1862 at the age of 48, after revolutionizing gun design and the use of machine tooling and standardization in manufacturing.

Colt was born in 1814 in Hartford, where his father operated a textile plant.  He lost his mother in early childhood to tuberculosis and was apprenticed at the age of 11 (like my own grandfather) to a local farmer.  The formal schooling included in his indenture terms led him to encounter a scientific encyclopedia whose stories about Robert Fulton and gunpowder secured a lifelong grip on his imagination.  By the age of 15, he had returned to his father's plant, where his access to tools permitted him to experiment with explosives and the new technology of electricity.  A brief encounter with boarding school at Amherst in Massachusetts terminated abruptly in the wake of a pyrotechnic incident that evidently amused his classmates more than the school's administration.  (What aspiring young science student hasn't blown up his school at some point?)  So Colt was sent to sea, where he served before the mast on a voyage to Calcutta.  On board, he noticed an interesting ratcheting mechanism in the ship's capstan and amused himself by whittling a wooden prototype of a revolving firearm, including a six-barrel cylinder, locking pin, and hammer.

Upon his return to New England, young Colt patented his idea in 1835 and embarked on a slightly shady series of huckstering enterprises to raise capital for its manufacturing and marketing.  Despite the promising performance of the revolver in Indian combat in Texas and Florida, Colt's first gun factory went bust in 1842.  Fortunately, however, he had the foresight to buy the patent for his revolver design, abandoned as worthless by his contemporaries.

Colt turned for several years to other visionary schemes, including underwater munitions and telegraph cables.  In 1846, however, he was able to return to his beloved revolver, when legendary Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Walker demanded a large shipment of Colts to assist in the new war with Mexico.  Colt had to scramble to start a new factory to fulfill the order.  This time he retained the services of Elisha K. Root, a brilliant mechanic who put the factory on a revolutionary footing of standardization and machine tooling.  Colt quickly became one of the wealthiest men in America, making a name for himself as a prototype for the modern businessman in the fields of mass marketing and product placement.  He died of gout in 1862, shortly after putting together a Union regiment that was to be manned exclusively by men over six feet tall wielding Colt revolvers, in order to quiet talk of his being a Confederate sympathizer.

Though the Colt also brought lasting fame and glory to Captain Walker of the Rangers, he didn't last long with it. He fell in battle shortly after obtaining his shipment.

The Colt's Manufacturing Company went on to produce the Colt .45 or "Peacemaker," the standard service revolver of the U.S. military between 1873 and 1892.  Still in business today, the company has produced more than 30 million pistols, revolvers and rifles.  Which brings us to today's story: in the wake of Connecticut's post-Newtown anti-gun legislation, Texas Governor Rick Perry is trying to lure Mossberg & Sons and Colt's Manufacturing to Texas.  Well, it's where Colt should have been to begin with. If only he'd understood where his true home lay, I'm sure he'd have elected to be buried here in Lamar, where local sentiment already has placed him in honor.

More sources here, here, here, here, here, and here.  There's an enormous literature on the man.  My brief summary above hardly touches on some of the most interesting episodes of his life, such as the love child he passed off as his nephew, and his brother's scandalous suicide on the eve of his conviction for murder.

Let's get that debate started

Unless that would be too misleading.

Healing and scarring

In Rocket Science piece, Ed Yong explores the state of research on limb regeneration.  It seems that mammals are much worse at this than amphibians, perhaps because mammals are more exposed to cancer risks if they take the lid off of cell growth, or perhaps because the excruciatingly long process of regeneration is more suitable for creatures with a very slow metabolism that can hibernate for long periods.  Perhaps fast-lane mammals had to develop a more quick-and-dirty way to seal off a wound.

Nevertheless, some mammals retain a surprising ability to regenerate some kinds of tissue.   Even humans, especially very young ones, can replace fingertips.  The process is of great interest, not just to replace missing parts, but to understand how to avoid disease processes that are associated with the formation of scar tissue, such as fibrosis of the heart or liver.

On the Road: Warner Robins Air Force Base, Air Museum

Flying Tigers!  

The P-40 Warhawk remains a highly iconic image.

Another iconic image, more recent.  This one is from the nose cone of an F-15.

This one's for Cassandra.

Transplants and trolleys

Popehat has a more thoughtful discussion of the lung transplant waiting list controversy than I've seen anywhere else--not so much the initial post as the comments.  Because the original post raised the issue of what unlucky person on the transplant list would die so that Sarah Murnaghan might get her new lungs, the talk naturally turned to the old "trolley car" ethical dilemma in which someone is asked to choose whether to divert a runaway car into a single person in order to save five people in its original path.

From my limited reading on the subject of transplants in the last week, I gather that the judge's order did not catapult Murnaghan to the top of the lung transplant list.  Instead, it made her eligible to be considered for a place somewhere on the list, taking into account everything about her disease and chances for survival, instead of being automatically placed below all adults on the list.  I gather also that far fewer people die while waiting for organs under the current system, which considers urgency, than did under the old system, which was closer to first-come-first-served.  It's not at all clear, therefore, that by being bumped up the list this little girl saved her own life at the expense of someone else's.  The most you can say is that her increased priority meant that others will wait longer.  If the list is ordered properly, most (if not all) of those others won't wait so much longer that they'll run out of time.

I was surprised to learn that lung transplants are even a reasonable option for cystic fibrosis patients.  Obviously the transplant doesn't cure the disease, which is genetic and affects the entire body, but the worst symptoms typically don't come back to affect the new lungs.  Although the CF patient still will suffer the disease's effects on the intestines and the pancreas, those are less likely to kill at an early age. In addition, while the new lungs themselves will not behave like CF lungs, the patient will be at risk for infection because of immunosuppression. That's a special problem for CF patients, who often have chronic lung infections, the seeds of which can be lurking elsewhere in the respiratory system, such as in the sinuses. Teenagers also have their own special post-transplant problems, because the rebellious years are not well suited for life on a strict medical regimen.

Lung transplants are a fairly new option for CF sufferers. The one-year survival rate is about 80%, while the 5-year survival rate is about 50%. For comparison, the five-year survival rate for kidney transplants is 90%.

When I was younger, children with CF weren't expected to make it to puberty. These days, with improved treatments, the life expectancy has increased to about 37 years.

Voters vs. cronies

This is what I like to see.  A Hackensack landowner's dispute with a local property board over a stinky eminent-domain gambit not only yielded a courtroom decision in favor of the landowner, but won't be going on to further expensive appeals, because the local community rose up and voted out the entire city council to the last man.

The surest way to win a lawsuit that never should have been brought in the first place is to induce a change of control in the other side's governance.

Voters should revolt more often.  We really don't have to put up with this.

Living cheek by jowl

I've been thinking more about the poo-print condo and why I find the prospect of living there so horrifying.  It's not so much that people are expected to pick up their dogs' droppings.  If you have dogs in a place so crowded that dog poop gets in the way as much as it would on your kitchen floor, without even having a chance to decompose properly and disappear, then of course people have to clean up after them.  It's just that these crowded people are so fundamentally unconcerned with each other that they don't naturally clean up after their dogs; instead they have to be forced to take responsibility by means of a DNA test.  It's the worst of both worlds:  neither intimacy nor autonomy; neither camaraderie nor privacy.

The challenge of civilization is to make bearable the choice of people to live in large numbers together while interacting closely in complex ways.  When it goes wrong, it really goes wrong.  In Heaven, I imagine, all men can "live in each other's trousers," as the Prince of Wales suggested to Camilla Parker-Bowles, in perfect joy.  Otherwise, as Sartre said, "Hell is other people."

It hasn't worked out so idyllically, by the way, for Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall now that they're free to merge as much as they'd like.  People choose to triangulate their marriages for a reason:  the mistress keeps the wife at a distance, and vice versa.  If you marry the mistress, it's not quite the same.

What those people in the poo-filled condo need is either a divorce or a better marriage.

Traveling Again

I'm on the road for a little while, heading south rather than north this time. Posts will be slow for a couple of weeks, at least from me: the rest of you are encouraged to post on any topics of interest for the Hall.

Places you couldn't pay me to live.

Poo-prints, for heaven's sake.  "Oh, no, my carpets!"

Freude, freude!

At least, of the schaden- variety:  Congress contemplates life with Obamacare, and finds that members and staff are quitting before it lands on them.  One guy worries about a "brain drain," which will keep me amused the rest of the day.

What's on their minds

A year or so ago, "Atlas Shrugged" surged in popularity on Amazon.  Now it's Orwell.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Defensive dispersal

From a Samizdata article on the advantages of open-source software:

Should they decide they do not like us encrypting our files or obscuring our online activity, it would be very hard for authorites to take open source software away.  The nearest they have got is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act [a failed 2002 anti-piracy bill] which was intended to protect music companies who wanted to put DRM [digital rights management, a tool to prevent copyright-infringement] into music by making trusted computing compulsory.  The idea was that computers would be required to have a special chip that would only let them run programs that would be cryptographically signed by some authority.  You would not be able to run your own programs. 

The bill got nowhere and such laws are unlikely to because open source software is so ubiquitous. It runs the Internet.  Samizdata runs on a computer running the Linux kernel using GNU libraries and uses an open source web server, database and blogging software written in languages compiled by open source compilers and interpreted by open source interpreters.  So do everyone else’s web sites.  Most of the electronic gadgets in the world that have any software at all have open source software in them, including phones and TVs.  None of this is going away. 

As much as Google and Microsoft have brands to protect, if the government makes laws big companies have to follow them.  Governments have no such hold over open source programmers who are geographically, organisationally and ideologically dispersed.

In other words, don't bunch up your forces.  And never, ever let the government get control of either communications or programming.

If you're in the mood for a terrific story about cyberparanoia, John Varley's 1985 novella "Press Enter" is available for the cost of shipping from Amazon, paired with a pretty good old story by Robert Silverburg, "Hawksbill Station," about a time-travel penal colony.

Honest ignorance

Maggie's Farm linked to this brief history of world maps.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the series is not how knowledge expanded with the advent of sailing ships and navigational instruments, but the degree to which each mapmaker honestly confronted the boundaries of his knowledge.  There is a strong tendency to fill in the territory beyond the edge of human knowledge with "what must be there."  For a long time, even after mapmakers were forced to confront the existence of the New World, they insisted on portraying it as a long, narrow island.  Explorers had brought back the news that the new continent was quite narrow at the isthmus of Panama, and old habits of mind imposed the belief for quite some time that the whole landmass was almost that narrow.  Only quite late in the series do we see a map that allows the known territory to bleed away into a neutral unknown in the distance rather than to make completely unfounded guesses about what might be found there.

Class action re NSA surveillance

Let's see what happens:

Former Justice Department prosecutor Larry Klayman amended an existing lawsuit against Verizon and a slew of Obama administration officials Monday to make it the first class-action lawsuit in response to the publication of a secret court order instructing Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of American customers on an "ongoing, daily basis.

The newest complaint is embedded in an article update here. (You may find it easier to read if you choose the download option, unless the trouble I'm experiencing scrolling on-screen is only a function of the nearby thunderstorm today.)   The lawsuit is a class action brought by a self-described public advocate who runs an organization called Freedom Watch in D.C.; he's also a Verizon customer.  His co-plaintiffs are Verizon customers who also happen to be the parents of a Navy Seal Team VI member who was killed when his helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan in 2011.  All three claim to be targets of hostile government attention as a result of their sharp criticism of the current administration.

The suit names President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA director Keith Alexander, and federal judge Roger Vinson (the FISA court judge who approved the NSA surveillance order recently leaked by Edward Snowden and The Guardian), as well as the communications companies who divulged the data.   It alleges violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments as well as a couple of federal statutes restricting communications companies from revealing data about customers.   It's framed as a "Bivens" suit, which refers to a 1971 Supreme Court case acknowledging a private right of action for damages against the federal government for the violation of constitutional rights by federal agents.  The starting bid is $20 billion.

This case is of special interest to me just now, because I've spent the last few weeks boning up on how to sue a federal agency:  very tricky business in light of the government's sovereign immunity, to which the exceptions are quite limited.  There is a maze of law addressing the differences between federal agents, federal agencies, and the Unites States itself, as well as the "discretionary function" exemption that shields the government even when there is a specific waiver of sovereign immunity.  So by taking time off to look into this lawsuit, I don't feel I'm entirely playing hooky today.  "Bivens" was on my list of subjects to master this week anyway.

I read the complaint closely to see whether it mentioned the issue raised by MikeD's recent post, about the illegality of NSA domestic surveillance, but there's nothing in it on that subject.

What I've not seen mentioned at all in this scandal

All debate of the rightness of Snowden's disclosure aside, there's one key piece of information I've not seen mentioned anywhere.  The President, the Speaker of the House, and many members of the Senate have come out saying that this program was legal, it was approved by congress, vetted by the courts, and the idea that this is somehow illegitimate has absolutely no basis.  But I think it does.  You see, the one missing element in all of this is that this sweep of meta-data is being handled by the NSA.

So what?  The NSA is certainly well equipped to handle this volume of data.  Communications Intelligence is their mission after all.  But there's one sticking point, and it's a doozy:

"The COMINT mission of the National Security Agency (NSA) shall be to provide an effective, unified organization and control of the communications intelligence activities of the United States conducted against foreign governments, to provide for integrated operational policies and procedures pertaining thereto. As used in this directive, the terms "communications intelligence" or "COMINT" shall be construed to mean all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications other than foreign press and propaganda broadcasts and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than intended recipients, but shall exclude censorship and the production and dissemination of finished intelligence."

The NSA may not, by its own charter, perform Communications Intelligence operations upon the United States or its citizens.  It's target, and mission, is COMINT ops on foreign targets.  Now, I am certain the Administration will claim that the actual targets of this program are foreign terrorists.  However, the one overriding law that the NSA must follow is the United States Signals Intelligence Directive (or USSID) 18.  I would draw your attention specifically to the unredacted portions of Sections 4 and 5, which specifically deal with how communications collected from sources known to be US citizens are to be handled.  I won't quote directly (you can read it all there) but in short, they can't.  They are forbidden by federal law from collecting, processing and disseminating Signals Intelligence gathered from US Citizens.  And I don't really care how the Administration spins it, this meta-data collection and processing, especially as laid out in everything we've seen, is in direct contravention of USSID 18.  And that makes it a federal crime.

Ideological Turing test

Clark at Popehat volunteered to answer questions about liberal policy, with the aim of challenging readers to distinguish between his answers and those of a true believer.  His purpose is to test whether he is able fully to understand his opponents' positions.  I find his assumed positions true to life.   I don't know of a liberal commentator who could do as well with small-government or libertarian viewpoints.

NYT, new and even more content-free

The New York Times is struggling with inconvenient climate data, but it's not ready to give up yet.  The caption to this week's environmental blogpost reads: "Despite a recent lull, climate scientists say it is an open question whether the pace of warming has undergone any lasting shift."

That sentence is almost entirely free of meaning.   Let's assume for the sake of argument that there was in fact warming in an earlier period, and not just jimmied data:  the sentence still is meaningless.   For one thing, the acknowledged "recent lull" would be more honestly described as a "period in which not even partisans can find evidence of warming in the actual data."   Discovering a flatline where you badly wanted to find an increase doesn't mean that the "pace" of warming has changed.  It means that any warming that might have been taking place earlier has stopped.  It has not merely "reduced its pace," it has stopped.

What's more, the question isn't whether a "change of pace" will "last," but whether the current lack of warming will shift into actual warming at some point in the future.   Again, assuming the prior warming period was genuine, what we have is a warming period followed by a flat period.  Does it make sense to assume that the previous warming trend was the true reality, and the recent flat period merely a "shift" in the reality that may or may not "last"?  It would be at least equally valid to say that the current flat period is the norm, and that the previous warming was the fluke that wouldn't "last."  That's especially true if your model is completely incapable of explaining or predicting either one.

The whole thing is just a muddleheaded way of saying the NYT believes that warming will occur in the future. When they believed they had a warming trend to point to in the past, they could with some credibility insist that there was no reason to believe it would not continue. What's the excuse now that the recent trend is flat? Why is the trend that suited their purposes decades ago more predictive than the more recent trend, which doesn't?

Particularly surprising is the casual reference to how the climate system is "still dominated by natural variability." Back when they thought the temperatures were still rising, "natural variability" was the refuge of denialist scoundrels.  Now it's back in fashion to explain why rising CO₂ didn't result in warming after all -- even though it's surely going to someday.

Finally, the old straw man:  the NYT sneers at denialists who dispute the role of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.  News flash:  no one disputes the role of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.  Lots of people do point out that it is a very weak greenhouse gas in comparison with the far more abundant greenhouse gas known as water vapor, and that there is good reason to believe that initial warming from  CO₂  causes an increase in cloud cover, which operates as a negative feedback mechanism to slow or even stop any warming that gets started.  All of which merely explains why the climate tends to cycle over very long periods rather than to run away in any direction.

Behind the veil

I've had the great pleasure of reconnecting with someone I knew in college:  a self-described "tunnel rat" who knew how to navigate all over campus using the underground steam tunnels.  Though I recalled that he knew all about the phone system, I didn't realize that he was paying his way through school by working for Southwestern Bell.  It's good to learn that he got his electrical engineering degree, got married, and recently retired in rural Southwest Colorado, where he volunteers for a narrow-gauge railroad.

What pleasant memories I have of his taking me under his wing and showing me how things worked behind the scenes.  It's odd that I never had any hesitation about following him into dark underground places.  He always gave off a simple big-brother vibe:  a Morlock checking to see if he could make friends with one of the Eloi.

Oathbreaker

This week's news raises an interesting question of ethics. Let's say that you are a citizen of some country, and take a job with a contracting firm who assigns you to a government agency belonging to that nation -- or you join the government agency directly. A condition of your job is that you take a high-level security clearance. As a part of this job, you give an oath to keep the secrets with which you are entrusted by your nation.

Now let's say that you learn a secret that you feel brings your duty to keep your oath into conflict with your duty to your fellow citizens. To be sure we don't just end up arguing about the politics of this case, let's say it's something really horrible. Say you discover that your elected government is brutally applying tax powers and audits to suppress political opposition... no, that won't do, it really happened.

Well, say you discover that the government is secretly recording the contents of every email or other electronic communication sent by anyone in the world... er, no, that one happened too.

Well, say that you discover that the government has a secret death program that it has been employing even though it can't be sure of who it is killing, and doctoring the records to make it look like the killings are justified... no, wait, that one's true too.

Well, OK, let's leave it hypothetical. Something really bad. Even worse than the things we've been learning are really true.

There's no question that your oath binds you to the duty of keeping the secret. You can't opt out of your oaths. The problem arises when we discover that there is a conflicting duty, a duty to your fellow citizens. In this situation, you will violate the one duty or the other: either you will fail to keep your oath, or you will fail to warn your fellow citizens of a great evil.

The question, then, is how to violate one of your duties in the least immoral way. Which one, and just how?

Two things make the Snowden case and the Manning case different in my mind. Manning strikes me as someone who should have been shot by firing squad, while Snowden is not for me in the same category. The first is that Manning broke faith with other soldiers, so that there were not two but three duties involved: his duty to keep his oath, his duty to keep faith with other soldiers under fire, and (he apparently believed) his duty to his fellow citizens.

The other thing that strikes me as an important difference between the Snowden case and the Manning case is the question of knowledge. One of the things that makes me believe that Manning is objectively worse is that he didn't even take the trouble to be sure just what he was releasing. He behaved recklessly by simply transmitting hundreds of thousands of documents he hadn't even read. He had no idea what or whom he was putting at risk.

So perhaps that's one criterion: being discriminate, rather than indiscriminate, in the violation of whichever one of your duties you choose to violate.

If so, though, doesn't that imply that it is better to release the information in a discriminate way than to keep the secret? Keeping this horrible secret -- whatever it is -- is to cause harm to every one of your fellow citizens, whereas releasing the secret is not. Thus, it would seem that someone who comes into possession of a truly terrible secret normally ought to violate the duty of oath-keeping, rather than the duty of a citizen.

Perhaps we could say that there can be no duty to keep an immoral secret, which would align with the above finding. However, we don't agree as a polity about just what morality entails. You would have to act on your own moral code, but as you are acting as a de facto agent of the government, you ought to be acting in accord with the morals of the polity as a whole. If you aren't doing that, it's hard to claim that you're acting in their interest.

If this is true, then you might release the secret, but only on the condition of submitting yourself to a trial by a jury of your peers. They would be the proper authority for evaluating whether the secret you released was indeed a severe enough violation of morality that your duty to your fellow citizens was more important than your duty to keep secrets.

For the current case, I think Hot Air is right about the proper route; maybe it mitigates the oath-breaking that the leak be given to a duly-elected representative rather than to some journalist (especially one who is himself immoral and hostile to your country, as Greenwald is). But again, I'm interested in the general question rather than the specific case.

Oath-breaking is a severe and serious moral crime. Is it ever appropriate if another duty conflicts with keeping your oath? If so, on what terms?

Three Birds With One Stone

I was very pleased today to drop a tree in the wooded section of the property just so that it would fall on another, standing dead, and get them both. They took down a smaller third tree on the way, which I wasn't planning to cut, but it'll do for firewood since it's down.

Now to buck them into logs and split them up, so they can season over the summer.

A Doggish Interlude

Normally I would not post videos of dogs here, but in honor of Tex's new companion and act of charity, I will relent and soften my humorless expression for just one moment.



There are your training goals, Tex!

Old-fashioned clean

Remember when your laundry and dishwasher detergents actually worked?  Phosphates weren't doing good things for the rivers and bays that our wastewater gets dumped into, because algae blooms like nothing better than a nice shot of fertilizer.  Municipal systems concentrate on removing pathogens like e. coli and largely ignore nitrates and phosphates.  If you're like me, though, and send your wastewater to a septic tank, all phosphates do is make the grass happier in the south meadow.  So I'm free to add tri-sodium phosphate back into my detergents.  Like magic, the stains are coming out of my cotton t-shirts and my dishes--even that pesky tupperware--come clean without any oily film.  Hardware stores carry TSP, or you can easily buy it online and have it shipped.

Now if only my toilets would flush the way they used to.  Well, it's my own fault for not installing composting toilets when we built here.

New member of the household

My homeless guy gave up and hopped a bus back to San Antonio, but not before leaving his little dog at the shelter.  It's a no-kill shelter, and he thought he was doing right by her rather than making her walk everywhere in the heat, but she's 11 years old, and I didn't feel good about her chances of adoption.  After a sleepless night and fruitless attempts to feel better about her by handing money to the homeless guy and the shelter, I got permission from my peerless husband, the best husband ever, to bring her home.  She's the first little dog I've had, about 18 lbs.  She seems cool with the big dogs.

My young traveller left the phone number of his ex-inlaws with the shelter, so I hope I've succeeded in getting a message to him that she's found a home.  He was pretty broken up about having to leave her.  No more life on the road for you, sweetheart.

You can see why I had to bring her and her human in out of the rain.

On Vegetarianism

Actually, I can think of several reasons why plants might be opposed to vegetarianism.

Muhammad and the Mangonel

It turns out that Islamic Law jurisprudence on the use of human shields begins with an extremely specific example. Once upon a time, Muhammad brought this mangonel into use against a city that had Muslim inhabitants...

Someone tell the Donovan.

Revenooers

Martin Bashir is upset about the recent bloom in anti-IRS sentiment.  He thinks "IRS" is the new euphemism for the n-word (whacka whacka), but anti-revenooer sentiment is nothing new.



Now the revenue man wanted grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road


It's a lot older than Steve Earle, too:

 

Wake up, wake up, Darlin' Corey
What makes you sleep so sound
The revenue officers are comin'
Gonna tear your stillhouse down.

For that matter, tax collectors weren't popular in the Bible.  That seems to have been a function not so much of an unwillingness to pay one's fair share of public expenses as of their unpleasant habit of overcharging for personal gain, but there you are.

I notice that a YouTube search for either "Copperhead Road" or "Darlin' Corey" yields a fair sprinkling of videos touching on the current IRS scandals.  I'd be careful about with whom I tried to associate the IRS in the public mind.

What's an Education For?

On his retirement, Donald Kagan explains the purpose of education as several generations of our ancestors have taken it. It turns out there are some commonalities that regularly recur.

[For the ancients] free men must know something of everything and understand general principles without yielding to the narrowness of expertise. The Romans’ recommended course of study was literature, history, philosophy, and rhetoric....

The seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The discovery and absorption of Aristotle’s works in the twelfth century quickly led to the triumph of logic and dialectic over the other arts.... [For the Medievals] An ambitious scholar could hope to achieve some semblance of universal knowledge. This was good in itself, for to the medieval men God was the source of all truth and to comprehend it was to come closer to divinity. They also placed great value on the practical rewards of their liberal education....

[Renaissance students] thought these studies delightful in themselves but also essential for achieving the goals of a liberal education: to become wise and to speak eloquently....

No more than the ancients did the Humanists think that liberal education should be remote from the responsibilities and rewards of the secular life of mankind. Their study should lead to a knowledge of virtue, but that knowledge should also lead to virtuous action in the public interest, and such action should bring fame as its reward....

That is a surprising degree of agreement! However, with the coming of the modern age, the trouble started.

You can read the rest and think it over, but I suggest you appreciate the strength of the frame Dr. Kagan has built. If you were to ask me what you ought to study, given the costs of education and the need to focus on a particular areas, I would say that some people who are especially good at it ought to study particular sciences where they find they have a great talent; but that most people, and especially those who intend to be men of the world and to act rather than think and experiment, could do little better than to study the Romans' recommended course, plus the most of the Medievals' annotations: "literature, history, philosophy... grammar, rhetoric, logic... arithmetic, geometry, astronomy [one might say instead the sort of physics necessary to understand astronomy], and music."

This provides you with the best rooting in Truth as we have known it [in history, philosophy, logic, arithmetic, geometry and physics], and with the best we have thought about Beauty [in literature and grammar, rhetoric and music, but also in history and philosophy].

At the union of Truth and Beauty is, I think, what Plato called The Form of the Good, or goodness itself; it is where the Medievals thought they would find the divine. You will get all you need to know about men, and -- as Maimonides said of such a course of study -- a chance at a vision of God.

We're all redistributionists

That's according to Matthew Ygglesias, anyway.  Of course, to get there, you have to redefine "redistribution" to mean "any social mechanism by which individuals don't end their lives with exactly the zero material resources they were born with."  Iglesias doesn't see an important distinction between redistribution by a government that takes money by force and parcels it out to favored groups, and redistribution that occurs as a side product of people's decisions to form generous family groups with intimates, or to trade freely with their more distant acquaintances.  In both cases, money starts out in one spot and ends up in another, right?  So why should we care whether the movement is controlled by a central government or by the choices of all the citizens acting freely via non-government institutions and cultural habits?

Ygglesias's conflation of these two ideas leads him to this aphorism:

Patriarchal family structures make it possible to get by without a generous welfare state, and an expansive welfare state tends to undermine women's dependence on men.

I guess that's true, too, if you think the only alternative to a welfare state is a patriarchal family.  But don't we have the option to structure families differently, if we choose?  My family is an excellent alternative to a welfare state, but it's hardly patriarchal.  And does an expansive welfare state really undermine women's dependence on men?  I'd say it just tends to make women dependent on more distant and uninvolved men.  Or does Ygglesias think that people who depend on a welfare state aren't really dependent?

It's hard to understand why so many people believe that the only realistic alternative to a welfare state is a lot of naked savages living alone in forests eating grubs.

None of this is the ostensible subject of his article, by the way.  He's actually trying to argue that Obamacare properly redistributes wealth from rich to poor and from men to women--so anyone who objects to Obamacare loves the 1% or hates women.

The "R" word

When is limiting the amount of purchases of food and other staples in order to stop contraband trading different in some way from rationing?

Never.

I know something they could try, though.  The state could assume ownership of the production of food and other staples, and distribute them to people fairly.  Then there would never be any shortages or any inequality.

Mental purity

Glenn Reynolds has it exactly right.  The zero-tolerance approach even to tiny gun-like objects that no one could possibly mistake for a real gun has less to do with physical safety than with the extirpation of dangerous concepts from the minds of children.  Of course it doesn't matter whether the "gun" is an inch long or made of Poptart or formed with a thumb and fingers.  All that matters is the idea.  Soon the word itself will be taboo, if it isn't already.  They'd punish the thought itself if they could read minds.

Children will have to be taught that guns do exist, and are not inherently evil, but that the people who run their schools are incapable of remaining calm if the concept of a "gun" enters their heads, and therefore must be protected from the very thought.  (But cross-dressing and Che Guevara?  Totally OK.)  They can then draw their own conclusions about the value of the other ideas they are receiving from these people every school day.

The Bush Doctrine Pays Off

I have some good friends who are Turks, and they are quite invested in this uprising.  The hope is not necessarily to bring down the government, but to bring to justice some of the worst criminals -- including, of course, the highest officials such as the Prime Minister.

I'd like to ask you to pay attention to it, and if you know people who follow such things, get them interested in it too.  The whole area -- from Turkey to Syria to Egypt, from Syria to Iraq to Iran -- is a highly unstable powderkeg at this point.  In a way that's what we wanted, and indeed just what we expected, when we overthrew Saddam.  There are democratic revolutions in every country in the region.

Too bad we have no leadership with the vision to, well, lead.  We could really use it just now.

What turns out to be in the bill after you pass it

What Oklahoma discovered in the fine print of Obamacare, but is having to sue to enforce:

The ACA contains an assortment of carrots and sticks, the pertinent ones here being the subsidies available for the purchase of health insurance through state-created exchanges, and the penalties for individuals who do not buy insurance and employers who do not provide it.  The employer taxes are triggered when employees use the tax credit, and in some cases the individual taxes are triggered when the credit is available to them.  The tax credits apply only to those using exchanges created by the states.  The federal government can create its own exchanges within states; however, it has no authority under the law to use them to offer subsidies and inflict the accompanying taxes. 

But there was an unforeseen development:  Some 33 states have refused to create those exchanges, Oklahoma among them.  If a state’s residents are not eligible for exchange subsidies, then its employers are not subject to the associated punitive tax.  Contra the administration’s amen corner in the media, this was not a rookie drafting error in the legislation — it was an intentional feature of the bill.  The law is explicitly written to deny subsidies to states that refuse to create exchanges.  The president and congressional Democrats simply failed to anticipate that the majority of states would refuse to create exchanges.

Funnies

And two recent Jay Leno cracks:  "I know how President Obama can shut down Guantanamo Bay.  All he has to do is turn it into a government-sponsored solar power company."

-and-

"Fox News has changed its motto from 'Fair and Balanced' to 'See!  I told you so.'"

Among the Mountains of the Dragon

I return from the Slickrock Wilderness and the Tail of the Dragon, where I spent the last few days. Slickrock Wilderness is among my favorite places in the world, a place of rivers and moss-covered stones, arching trees lush and verdant, and sharp ridged-mountains.

This river is where I made my encampment.  I took the following video so that you could get a sense of what it is like to be there.  Imagine you have just left your camp, with the scent of pine smoke from the fire lingering, until you step down among these stones and the breath of the rushing river sweeps it away.

The Dragon itself is deadly, and provides the adventure to complete the perfection of the scene.  I was joined there by an old comrade from Iraq, whom I had last seen south of Baghdad at FOB Falcon, just before he got on a helicopter after fifteen months in Mahmudiyah and the Mada'in.  We saw that a rider went off the cliffs just ahead of us.  I helped several other bikers and a truck drag the Harley back up the cliff and onto the highway so that it could be evacuated.  What became of the rider, no one seemed to know.

Sunday's ride home was in a heavy downpour, but I hooked up with a motorcycle club headed toward Atlanta for the first way.  One of the members was a veteran and a friend of my friend, and only too glad to have me ride with them through the storm.  It was a great ride, in part because of the severity of the weather, which set the boldness of the company in its clearest relief.

To be numbered among such company and travel between beauty and danger:  it is among the things that are best in life.

Castaway

I think I've mentioned before how unhinged I get when confronted with a homeless animal: the orphan's panic, which also manifests itself as a lifelong preoccupation with tales about the sudden collapse of human civilization.  Yesterday I received a double-whammy, when a young man and his little dog took refuge at our church from a sudden rainstorm.  How happy we were to get some rare rain, and how ironic that it should be falling on a fellow trying to make a safe home for his pup while living out of a knapsack!  We made him come inside, while he tried to insist he was OK under a large tree.  Then the storm knocked out our power, so we finished the service by candlelight, blessedly free for once from the electric organ I've never cared for.

It developed that our young refugee had somehow become separated all at once from his wife, his job, and his home in San Antonio, some 200 miles away.  Normally, I confess, I am not tremendously moved by the prospect of a life so disastrously disordered; I do what I can without a lot of upset, and then typically disengage.  One of my most frequent prayers, not uttered without trepidation, is that my heart of stone should be melted.   It was answered at least in part this week, but even though I knew how much it would hurt, I didn't really know, if you understand me.  Even at the distance of more than thirty years, I retain the most excruciating memories of being at loose ends between jobs, between apartments, profoundly alienated, and casting about with some desperation for a family or society to be plugged into.  It's not so hard to replace any one of those things at a time, but finding yourself cut loose from all of them at once is a disorienting horror: a shock to the core.  And yet, knowing and remembering all that, it still took the presence of the dog to cut through my defenses.

Our church got the fellow set up for the next week in a modest motel with some cash and some food.   He's already made the rounds on foot to look into the simplest sort of job nearby.  Why am I so gripped by his crisis?  I suppose he's pushing two of my buttons very hard:   it didn't occur to him to abandon the dog and leave town, with the excuse that his life had fallen apart, and it didn't occur to him to find a way to live on public assistance.  Instead, he has humbled his pride and asked for help from individuals in his path.  To my way of thinking, therefore, it lies with me now to figure out a way to help him rebuild a shattered life.  He wants so badly to solve the most basic problem of finding a useful function that will earn him the money for food and shelter.  A home, a job, and his dog for family.  These are the things that make it possible to carry on when everything else is stripped away.

Horseshoes, hand grenades, and pregnancy

More from Rocket Science (it's a good week).  Suppose you've put a lot of time and effort into a research project, and you've chosen for your own reasons to use the arbitrary but time-honored and respectable standard of statistical significance (i.e., p = 0.05, but your results stubbornly refuse to make the grade.  You could instead quote the effect size with a confidence interval, but for whatever reason you refuse to do that.  All that time and effort, with nothing to publish, seems unfair.

Not to worry.  New, substance-free circumlocutions have sprung up to describe how tantalizingly close your work has come to rendering meaningful results.  Psychologically Flawed has published a convenient list in alphabetical order, including such evasive or emotionally charged winners as:

"flirting with conventional levels of significance (p=0.1)"

"inconclusively significant (p=0.070)" 

"narrowly missing conventional significance (p=0.054)" 

"nearly borderline significance (p=0.052)" 

"not absolutely significant but very probably so (p=0.05)" 

"only slightly missed the conventional threshold of significance (p=0.062)" 

"teetering on the brink of significance (p=0.06)" 

"trend bordering on statistical significance (p=0.066)" 

"very closely brushed the limit of statistical significance (p=0.051)"

They coulda been a contenda!  My favorite: "not significantly significant but . . . clinically meaningful (p=0.072)."  I look forward to papers describing results as "longing for significance but thwarted by hidebound, linear, and cruelly normative conventional standards."

Why rape is not like property theft

More from Rocket Science:

When you carefully tuck your high-value portable property under the passenger seat (just kidding, smash-and-grabbers! That's definitely not where my iPad is!), it's because you don't want potential thieves to know it's there.  But draping your vagina in a floor-length modesty frock is unlikely to persuade anyone that don't have one, and therefore might not be worth violating.

Other dissimilarities at the link.

The art of visual communication

What happens when novices, trainees, and experts are asked to draw the same thing?  The novices mimic textbook illustrations, the trainees reproduce images from personal observation, and the experts generate schematics that eliminate detail they no longer consider essential.

H/t Rocket Science.

Are warmenistas really CFC deniers?

Bookworm Room has up an interesting post about global warming, CO₂, and CFCs.   Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry at the University of Waterloo, contends that temperature trends don't track CO₂ levels at all well when solar input is eliminated, but they do track CFC levels wonderfully.  Bookworm's readers engage in a spirited discussion of whether CFC emissions used to be a manmade problem that has now largely been solved, since CFCs were largely replaced by new refrigerants by 1989 treaty), or whether human contributions never were that large in comparison with natural sources to begin with.

Shifts & expedients

The pages I'm formatting at Project Gutenberg this morning come from a particularly delightful and useful book called "Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel, and Exploration," published in 1871.  The authors seem to have seen military service in the Crimea and South Africa, in addition to exploring in Asia and Australia.  They put together detailed notes, copiously illustrated, on the proper provisioning of expeditions, including how to build any number of things on the road, from tents to boots to wheeled carts to rafts to sledges.  A couple of pages for examples:

It will be a little while before the book is finished and posted to the free Project Gutenberg site, but you can see what a wealth of material there is over there.

Price fixing: the endless policy

Argentina is discovering what every other country that's tried to fix prices has already discovered:  whoever's in charge eventually realizes that he can't make it stick unless he dispenses with all those tiresome restrictions on political power and becomes a dictator for life.  It's not Kirchner's fault, though, right?  She had the best of intentions.  She just needs everyone to go along for their own good, and they're not cooperating.  How long  before she figures out she's got to stop her subjects from leaving the country?

Fifty Rules for Dads of Daughters

This is one of those lists that gets passed around because it is heartwarming and because it is supposed to be fairly good advice. It's a surprisingly young man who has written it, if I'm reading his biography correctly!

All of you will have guessed that I'm interested in the list in part as a way of exploring the differences between sons and daughters. How many of these rules would be different if written for sons? Are there other rules you'd advise for sons but not daughters, or especially for sons, that are not on this list?

One that strikes me as an obvious choice is number 7, "She will fight with her mother. Choose sides wisely." This is not a problem with a son: you are always on his mother's side, even on those occasions when you take her aside later and persuade her to change her mind.

Lysenkoism

Peter Ferrara has an article in Forbes drawing climate-science lessons from the disgraceful career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.  Not caring that much for the tone of the article, and especially of the comments, I'm not going to quote from it.  Instead I'll summarize Lysenkoism as I understand it.  I find it interesting that the public discourse on the "science" of climate change is now so debased that Lysenkoism is being trumpeted as a cautionary tale both by warmists and by skeptics.

Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who discovered as a young man in 1927 that he could improve the sprouting qualities of winter wheat by exposing them to unusual cold and moisture.  He then concluded, on the basis of no apparent (or perhaps falsified) evidence, that the improved qualities of the wheat seed would breed true, such that future generations of seeds would sprout more successfully even without the cold/wet treatment.  This attempt to overturn the principles of modern genetics in favor of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a throwback to Lamarck) went on to enjoy an enthusiastic, confused, and scandalous vogue in the Soviet Union for several decades.   In 1938 Lysenko was named president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, from which position he wielded enormous power in Soviet science.  The Soviet Union showered him with accolades, including seven Orders of Lenin and the title of "Hero of Socialist labor.”

Despite his deep confusion about the underlying mechanisms of genetics, Lysenko continued to implement genuinely helpful agricultural innovations that mitigated, to some degree, the disastrous famines caused by communist policy.  Lysenko's alignment with his leadership's political goals then bled over in the illogical but common human way to his evidence-free assertions about genetics.  So important were his anti-famine successes, combined with his politically correct background as a member of the peasant class untainted by bourgeois education, and his ability to motivate peasants to return to farming in the wake of collectivist confiscation of their farmlands, that Lysenkoism became official Soviet policy under Stalin.  Lacking actual evidence for his eccentric theories, and facing new pressure when his later theories did not pan out (such as the requirement to till the fields to a depth of five feet), Lysenko succumbed to the temptation to use political power to silence his enemies.  Andrei Sakharov charged him with having the arrest and death of "many genuine scientists" on his hands.  Under his influence, for instance, the founder of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences was sent to his death in the gulag.

About a decade after the conclusion of Stalin's reign of terror in 1953, there was a movement toward the restoration of the scientific method in the Soviet Union and a purging of pseudo-science inspired by political fashion.

Truth over theory: it will always lead to better science and generally to better public policy.  My own view, in addition, is that it makes for better people and happier relations among them.  When I see beliefs that can't be maintained in the population except through lies, self-delusion, and force, I see beliefs that belong on the ash-heap of history.  As C.S. Lewis describes the techniques employed by unscrupulous tempters: "You see the little rift?  'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.'"

The Brilliant & Colorful Ages

Memorial Day

My brothers at BLACKFIVE have many excellent posts to commemorate the holiday. Keep scrolling.

To many of you as to me, it is an important day. All the best to you.

Take this, in memory of one of the ones honored today: the poet Joyce Kilmer, killed in the first World War while he was acting as a scout for the American Expeditionary Force. It is about one of those whom he thought worthy of defense.

As Winds That Blow Against A Star

(For Aline)

Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance
Walk weary and laborious ways?

But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
The glory of celestial mirth.

The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
As winds that blow against a star.

Steyn on the Mundane

Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence....”

Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as, say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon.

The world is changing that way.

A Policeman's Lot Is Such A Happy One

In a story titled "Parking Tickets Issued on Wrecks While Stockholm Burns," the Swedish press looks on in wonder at what their nation has become.

[W]hile the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

But...

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

It's as if the whole country of Sweden has become a university.

H/t: Dad29.

UPDATE: The police are finally roused to action!

Faced by another night of terror at the hands of predominantly immigrant rioters, Swedes grown tired of the police’s inability to put an end to the unrest took to the streets Friday night to defend their neighborhoods.... In the Stockholm suburb of Tumba the police decided to abandon their earlier non-intervention policy as a large group of police officers rounded up and dispersed a group of vigilantes trying to fend off rioters.

The decision to round up vigilantes while, according to Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving, ”doing as little as possible” to stop rioters, met with a wave of protests in various social media and on the Internet.

Who's stopping you?

I'd reveal the source of this (probably unoriginal) joke if I didn't think it would interfere with its enjoyment:

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbors stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. 

During our friendly conversation, I asked their 12 year old daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President someday. 

Both of her parents -- liberal Democrats -- were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?" 

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." 

Her parents beamed with pride! 

"Wow . . . what a worthy goal!" I said. "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that!" I told her. 

"What do you mean?" she replied. 

So I told her, "You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and trim my hedge, and I'll pay you $50.  Then you can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house." 

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?" 

I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." 

Her parents aren't speaking to me.