Exaggerated confidence

My newly purchased book, "The Invisible Gorilla," discusses how we over-estimate our mental powers. Tests like the "gorilla on the basketball court" show not only that people fail to see the gorilla (because they're concentrating on adding up the number of passes made by players), but also that they are terrible at predicting how well they'd be likely to do on this and many other cognitive/attention tests. The section I'm reading now asks how well we think we understand seven basic gadgets: (1) a bicycle, (2) a zipper, (3) a flush toilet, (4) a cylinder lock, (5) a car speedometer, (6) a piano key, and (7) a helicopter.

Now, that gives me pause!  I'm pretty confident of my understanding of a bicycle.  The author claims that people challenged to make a sketch of its workings do things like omit the chain, or connect the chain to both wheels, or draw the pedals outside the chain, but I don't believe I'd make any of those mistakes.  On the other hand, if zipper technology were erased tomorrow, the world would be using buttons and hooks for a long time if they were relying on me to re-invent that mainstay of modern fashion.  I know a flush toilet has something to do with siphon power, but that's about where I quit.   Years of dusting the perfectly visible workings of the hammers in my piano have left me a bit vague about how all the levers fit together, though I do understand generally that the key tilts on a lever and that eventually translates that motion to a final hinged piece that strikes a string.  All I really know about speedometers is that they know what fraction of a mile represents one revolution of my tire; years ago I was warned that putting the wrong size of tire on your car will make your speedometer mislead you about your speed.   Helicopters and cylinder locks might as well be black magic.

So perhaps some education is in order, beginning with the onomatopoetic zzzzzzzipper.  

The basic idea is a row of interlocking teeth that fit tight when in a straight line but loosely when bent into an arc.   If the row is in a spiral shape, it generally is made of polyester, while "ladder-type" arrangements typically are made of metal.  According to Wikipedia, "A special type of metal zipper is made from pre-formed wire, usually brass but sometimes other metals too.  Only a few companies in the world have the technology."  This is the sort of thing that sets one's conspiracy-detectors buzzing, but a helpful Forbes article explains how one Japanese firm came to dominate the zipper business by the early years of this century, including a charming anecdote about growing pains as an Asian company attempts to expand overseas:

Yoshida told the employees he sent abroad to melt into the local population as much as possible.  In one incident an employee sent to Holland spent months studying Dutch so that he could make an opening day speech to his employees in their own language.  After his speech the workers are reported to have said, “Wow, Japanese sure sounds a lot like Dutch.”

Of course, no sooner had Japanese entrepreneurs sewed up the zipper market than China began to give them a run for their money.

Here are some do-it-yourself repair guides for a broken zipper, which should be easy to complete with our newfound understanding of the mysterious mechanism.

DNA molecules operate very much like a zipper.  In fact, all enzymes employ the trick of opening up a clasp so that an interlocking shape can be inserted or removed before the clasp springs back.

Return to sender

Barrycades are being carried across town and dumped at the White House.

One of the Zero Hedge commenters adds: "BREAKING: Washington Redskins drop "Washington" from their name because it's embarrassing." Ross Douthat, on the other hand, probably would say their methods are unsound. And Glenn Beck organizes volunteers to clean the Mall up, because the National Park Service has been too busy harassing veterans to do its job.

Suspending the critical faculty

Robert Weissberg, Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at The University of Illinois-Urbana, outlines a cure for what ails the American university.

Now here's my plan. The Koch brothers will secretly underwrite a version of the traditional "Junior Year Abroad" with a strong Peace Corp component.  Have students live among the locals, on small stipends, eat their food and so on.  University credit will be given and everything will be totally free, including transportation.  Meanwhile, there will generous "supervision" fees (i.e., bribes) to the university and professors.  For a start, send out perhaps a hundred students from each of the top 25 universities. 

... 

We'll use a seductive name--"Promoting Economic Justice, One Village at a Time" or "Peace Through Understanding." ...  Locals, including the wise village elders will teach the courses with lots of hands-on experience working in the fields harvesting crops, clearing brush and similar Peace Corps-like activities (recall the early 1960s glory years of helping in the Cuban sugar cane harvest was the ultimate liberal status symbol).  For pedagogical purposes, illnesses will be exclusively treated with traditional, natural remedies (no Big Pharma pills, no greedy doctors!) while all disputes will likewise be settled in accord with indigenous customs.  Critically, students will be told that they are there to learn, not proselytize Western values, and so if men beat their wives, don't criticize; try to understand.  The model is participant-observer anthropology, not the Western missionary.

Once the graduates of the new program return and start raising uncomfortable questions in class about the evils of American society and the socialist paradise on other shores, Weissberg has an even more brilliant and cost-effective plan for dealing with the outraged professors.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

The Everything Store

We rely on Amazon out here for a great many things, from tablecloths to appliances to whatever food our (single) local grocery store doesn't carry.  Bloomberg is running excerpts from a fascinating new book about this useful company and the surprising life story of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who recently bought the Washington Post and moonlights once a week on a company that's trying to establish affordable commercial space flight.

What keeps me coming back to Amazon?  I rarely shop for anything I can't find somewhere on its website.  They offer a year's reliable two-day shipping at a flat rate.  Their customer reviews are reliable.  They make it easy for me to check out, without any of the tiresome repetitive logging in or glitchy "shopping cart" pages that plague so many other e-tail sites.   In every way, they focus on pleasing customers.

Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com.  Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark. 

When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb.  They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself.  Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company. 

... 

Amazon employees live daily with these kinds of fire drills.  “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at the company’s biannual meeting held at Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than 17,000 seats.  “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Wilke replied.  “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers.  We treat them as precious sources of information.”

On the Feast of St. Edwin

Columbus Day may be right out, and anyway it was one of those days that chases a Friday or Monday in the hope of making a day off for people. But there's no reason to concede that the 12th of October is just some ordinary day. It's also the feast day of one of the great Anglo-Saxon saints, the kind Tolkien might have loved: St. Edwin of Northumbria, a worthy man whose life exemplifies the virtues of hospitality, clear thought, friendship, and defense of the innocent.

Tough review

A Slate contributor takes the ever-popular pop-psy author Malcolm Gladwell to task:

Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their default instinct to believe what they are being told.  They help because when readers see "science" they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions.  I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.

Malcolm Gladwell's name inexplicably tends to take up the space that more properly in reserved in my memory for Matt Ridley, an excellent author who deserves considerably more attention.  (My favorite popular science writer, however, remains Nick Lane.)  This Slate review also suggests to me that a better use of my time than reading Gladwell's latest ("David and Goliath") would be to read the reviewer's own "The Invisible Gorilla." The title refers to a video experiment many of us probably have watched, in which viewers are asked to count the number of passes in an excerpt from a basketball game, and uniformly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit who runs through the players in the middle of the action.  The book is about our deceptive intuitions concerning our powers of attention and memory.

"I don't know what that means"

And yet, the Senate Majority Leader employed words adapted to the meanest understanding:

"Don't screw this up."

He was responding to the brash decision of the Mayor of D.C. to walk across the lawn and horn in on Sen. Reid's press conference to demand that the Senate pass the House's measure to fund D.C. during the government shutdown.  Sen. Reid walked off in a huff, leaving the Mayor and another flack to try to pour a little oil on the waters.  What did he think Reid meant by "Don't screw this up"?   He couldn't imagine.

 

How thick is your bubble?

It's Friday, and that means it's Quiz Time!  For once, I've found a quiz where I score right smack in the middle of the road.  Apparently I'm neither working class nor upper class, but truly middlebrow.  Score:  44.

Focussing the mind wonderfully

I love recalls.  Legislators are way too complacent without them.  Legislators should live in either constant fear of their constituents, or serene indifference to staying in office.

Citizens step up when government throws a tantrum

I encourage donations to Fisher House.

An Occasional Lapse in Absence

I would like to thank Tex especially, and the rest of you also, for carrying on so well in my absence. I will continue to be mostly not around for a while, but today I have had some time to catch my breath and look around a bit. I don't know if it will last, but it has given me a chance to come by and see what you have been doing.

Thank you all who have written to inquire about my beloved wife. She is doing better. It will still be a while before she is fully recovered, but I hope that in a few weeks she will at least be more mobile. For now, as Tex put it, I am much occupied with her care; but this is good, in a way. It is a chance to honor my oath, and to focus on love in sickness -- or, at least, in injury -- as well as in the joy of robust health.

On which subject, more or less, a set of word clouds broken up by various ages, by sex (far less interesting differences are discovered here than usual, this time), and by various emotional states. I think there is an interesting correlation between the positive emotional states and certain age groups. See what you think.

Grownups only

Gov. Christie often alienates me with his statism, but I have to admit it's an unusually sensible and honest brand of statism.  He also charms me with his ability to step out of traps and ruts and think on his feet.  You can watch him here demolishing his opponent in a debate, without veering one step from the path of truthfulness and courtesy.  She's left looking like a snide teenager who stumbled into an event meant for adults.  Ronald Reagan couldn't have done it better.

What do Tea Partiers want?

Our rulers are as clueless on this subject as Freud about women.  From Kevin D. Williamson this morning:

But our so-called liberals are committed Hobbesians.  Argue for a reduction in taxes, or a more restrictive interpretation of delegated powers, or allowing the states to take the lead on health care and education, and they’re sure that the next step is a Hobbesian hootenanny in which all of our rump roasts are crawling with bacteria, somebody snatches Piggy’s glasses, and, worst of all, there’s no NPR to ask what it all means.  Like Hobbes, they believe that you hold your property at the sufferance of the state, and that you should pipe down and be grateful for whatever you are allowed to keep.  But the American creed is precisely the opposite:  The state exists at our sufferance, not the other way around, and while few of us actually hold the beliefs that Senator Reid attributes to us and long to abolish the state as a general principle, more than a few of us are interested in making some deep changes to this state.  We may not want to shut it down entirely, but we aren’t sure we want it to load another few trillion dollars in debt onto us.  We aren’t throwing bombs, but we aren’t going to give it everything it demands, either.  Not 40 percent of the last dollar, not a dime to subsidize abortions, not control over our children’s educations or our own consciences.  Hobbes wrote about subjects.  We’re citizens.

It might be more accurate to say we have a tradition of aspiring to be citizens, which has never been universally honored among us and is not guaranteed to survive if we persist in agreeing to act more like subjects in return for physical security and our share of the plunder.

Not talking like a Martian

Thomas Sowell sums up our frustration with conservative leaders who can't communicate a simple point to save their lives:

When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about “OMB numbers” versus “CBO numbers”—as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown.  Why talk to them in Beltway-speak? 

When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the “CR,” that is just more of the same thinking—or lack of thinking.  Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the continuing resolution that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.

I've worked with way too many lawyers like this: addicted to meaningless acronyms. Would it kill Boehner to get in the habit of calling it a "blank check" instead of a clean CR?

"Sir, you are recreating."

If you know anyone who was caught outside the country on 9/11 and unable to fly back home for several days, you know what it's like to be caught up in a national emergency and temporarily inconvenienced.  You probably never expected to be locked in a hotel at gunpoint in Yellowstone Park, though, or forbidden to take snapshots of buffalo from your bus window.  "Stop recreating this instant!"

I think the park rangers in this story are the spiritual brothers of our local game warden, whose mission in life is to use his tiny police power to harass golf cart drivers.

Mutt language

A thoroughly enjoyable "Great Courses" lecture got me interested in John McWhorter's many books on liguistics.  This week I've been reading "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" and "The Power of Babel."  The first is about the mixed-up roots of English, while the second treats more generally the theories of how languages evolve, but still with a lot of emphasis of English's peculiar history.

Most of us notice early on, I suppose, that English generally has three broad choices in expressing an idea:  an earthy Teutonic word, a polite French alternative, and a technical Latin expression.  We think, reason, and cogitate; we fight, combat, and altercate.  It's easy enough to see how Old English arrived on the shores of Great Britain in an early Germanic form with Anglo-Saxon invaders who overwhelmed the native Celts; later, we got another dose of Germanic influence from the Vikings.  Latin came over with Julius Caesar and was preserved by the Church.  French enjoyed a brief supremacy after the Norman invasion.  These influences explain much of English's "hybrid" flavor.

McWhorter makes a case, however, for two additional influences that are more controversial and get less press.  First, he believes that English grammar, if not its vocabulary, was heavily influenced by Welsh and Cornish.  These Celtic languages, which are Indo-European but from a completely different branch from either Latin or the Germanic languages, share a highly unusual grammatical structure with English:  the "meaningless do" that causes modern English speakers to say "do you see the bird," whereas King James or earlier English styles would have followed the trend common to the rest of Europe, and said "saw you the bird."  Welsh and Cornish also share with Enblish a heavy reliance on the progressive tense to express ordinary action in the present, such as "I'm drinking the coffee," whereas our Germanic and Romance cousins (and our Old English ancestors) would say "I drink the coffee."

Second, McWhorter traces a surprising fraction of English vocabulary to a very old collision in Northern Europe between the proto-Germanic language and certain unidentified settlers who may well have been Phoenician/Carthaginians.  This influence is strongest in vocabulary having anything to do with the sea or fishing; thus, we have Latin-rooted words like mariner right alongside "seafarer," though (according to McWhorter) "sea" is of a mysterious linguistic ancestry neither Latin nor Germanic.  The Phoenicians are known for some surprisingly wide-ranging navigation.  As McWhorter acknowledges, however, the specific archeological evidence for Phoenician inroads into Northern Europe is quite slim.  Still, he makes an interesting linguistic case.

Much of "The Power of Babel" describes a long, slow, inevitable background of cyclical change that's something like the predictable but opposed geological forces of erosion and uplift.  Over centuries, auxiliary words abbreviate and glue themselves as prefixes and suffixes to other words, often in the form of case and gender endings.  (He gives the example of the French "pas," which originally signified merely a step, as in "he didn't walk a step," but later transformed itself into a piece of abstract grammatical machinery expressing general negation, not limited to physical motion, as in "il ne parle pas.")  At the same time, the natural tendency to swallow an unaccented syllable tends to erode many prefixes and suffixes over time, leaving word roots scraped clean again and ready to undergo the next cycle of accretion.

Against this background is another kind of change that results from the collision of cultures.  In McWhorter's view, vocabulary often is shared any time two languages rub up against each other, but the most fundamental grammatical shifts happen when large numbers of influential people are forced to learn a language as adults, as often happens when invaders take root and settle down.  People who learn a language in adulthood rarely master its most subtle intricacies, and one of the first things to go is a lot of fussy case and gender endings.  English's proto-Germanic ancestor may well have undergone such a simplification in the very distant past.  The evidence is even clearer that the Vikings more recently left English a less inflected language than its European neighbors, with scarcely anything remaining of that nominative-genetive-dative-accusative-male-female-neuter-singular-plural business that afflicts students of Latin, Greek, Russian, German, and to a lesser degree the modern Romance languages like French or Spanish.

Like most linguists, McWhorter is impatient of the notion of a "correct" form of any language.  He analogizes it to the idea that a popular song can have a canonical form.  The only thing he would characterize as an "error" is a usage that marks a speaker as non-native, like saying "We'd all prefer to go to the store now, isn't it?"  (He calls it talking like a Martian.)  Other variations in spelling, vocabulary, or grammar merely reflect local variations in dialect that are slowly developing into independent languages in the same imperceptible way that species differentiate from common ancestors.  At the same time, he's a great believer in the difference between clumsy and skillful communication within a particular dialect, and both writes and speaks in an extremely clear and standard English.

M/Patriarchy

Sarah Hoyt asks today, if women marry the government, from whom will they sue for divorce?

The mind of a Justice

New York Magazine is running an interview with Antonin Scalia.  The interviewer's not bad, though a bit callow.  She is unused to talking to conservatives.  There is a wonderful exchange on the value of testing one's opinions against a dissenting voice--without, of course, hoping to lose the argument:

[Scalia:]  I am something of a contrarian, I suppose.  I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me.  I say, “I better reexamine my position!”  I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous.  Because there’s nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws. 

Really?  So if you had the chance to have eight other justices just like you, would you not want them to be your colleagues? 

No.  Just six. 

That was a serious question! 

The interviewer is also startled to hear that Justice Scalia is serious about his Catholic faith.  That may be another kind of creature she's not used to encountering.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping

An article on HotAir mentioned a constititional wrinkle I was not familiar with:

There is lingering confusion over the limits on the Senate regarding budgets.  It’s true that the House has to originate bills that raise revenue (Article I Section 7 of the US Constitution), but either chamber can originate spending bills.  Since the debt ceiling is not a tax, the Senate can originate it.

This seems a bit odd, as if increasing the federal piggy bank by borrowing were not "raising revenue" in the same way that imposing taxes is.   It's plausible, perhaps, given the Founders' probable inability to imagine that the U.S. would become the world's reserve currency and gain the ability to borrow seemingly unlimited amounts, right up to the point where the currency collapses.   I found what seems to be a thoughtful Constitutional website, with this to say:

In Federalist 66, for example, Alexander Hamilton writes, "The exclusive privilege of originating money bills will belong to the House of Representatives." This phrase could easily be construed to include taxing and spending.  The Supreme Court has ruled, however, that the Senate can initiate bills that create revenue, if the revenue is incidental and not directly a tax.  Most recently, in US v Munoz-Flores (495 US 385 [1990]), the Court said, "Because the bill at issue here was not one for raising revenue, it could not have been passed in violation of the Origination Clause." The case cites Twin City v Nebeker (176 US 196 [1897]), where the court said that "revenue bills are those that levy taxes, in the strict sense of the word." 

However, the House, it is explained, will return a spending bill originated in the Senate with a note reminding the Senate of the House's prerogative on these matters.  The color of the paper allows this to be called "blue-slipping."  Because the House sees this as a matter of some pride, the Senate is almost guaranteed not to have concurrence on any spending bill which originates in the Senate.  This has created a de facto standard, despite my own contention (and that of the Senate) that it is not supported by the Constitution.

That's an interesting issue if we're wondering about how to think of Obamacare, by the way, which originated in the Senate, now that the Supreme Court has explained to us that it's a tax, not a penalty, sort of.   In fact, there's a new challenge mounting to Obamacare on just that point, which may eventually turn on whether the revenue raised by the tax is incidental rather than direct.   Now that taxes no longer are viewed primarily as revenue-raising tools but as carrots and sticks, it's very hard even for smart Supreme Court justices to work out what "taxes, in the strict sense of the word" is supposed to mean.  So much effort is spent publicizing goodies in each new entitlement program, that our Congressional leaders are quite adept at obfuscating what a tax is.  Even if that confusion were to be cleared up any time soon, I'm not aware that the Supreme Court has ever tried to help us understand the fine Constitutional gradations of meaning that separate "raising revenue" from "borrowing great huge pots of money in order to facilitate an endless avalanche of increased spending."

Until recently, I never noticed the debt ceiling or understood why it might be important.  In a political climate in which people (including our chief executive) argue with a straight face that Congress can pass all the crazy spending obligations it wants, and never worry about how to pay for them, then berate their opponents for threatening to "dishonor" the country's financial "obligations" if they object to breaking a hard-and-fast limit on borrowing, the debt ceiling increasingly seems like a red line to me.  More than that:  an Angel with a fiery sword.

O.P.M.

Some California supporters of Obamacare are getting a rude shock.

Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four. 

. . . 

"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

The traffic-cone wars

We take these humble guardians of civilization for granted.  Now an organization has sprung up to correct that injustice:

Until the late 20th century, traffic cones were not thought worthy of scientific study.  It is the Society's mission to counteract these centuries of neglect.  By preserving and studying these "Helpers of Humanity," we hope to allow future generations the opportunity to enjoy these magnificent creatures in their natural habitats.

Not a moment too soon. The sturdy traffic cone has exploded onto the public scene as the pointy end of the spear in our government's attempt to educate the public about what happens when they get uppity. That's not to say that all of the public is taking its lesson in the proper spirit:  some citizens are embracing outright anarchy.

Schemes are being hatched on some of the darker corners of the Internet to corner the market in orange cones and begin deploying them strategically against federal bureaucrats, perhaps even cordoning off the entirety of the District of Columbia.  Because of Congress's failure to regulate this market, traffic cones are freely available on the Internet for purchase by authorized personnel from a variety of corporate manufacturers (see here and here).  Buyers don't need to pass any background checks or secure a license first.  All they need is money.

Did you know traffic cones were invented in 1914?  They've come a long way, not only in manufacturing standards but also in their critical role in the body politic.  Sadly, many did not survive the transition to a new world order.  Those that did, however, are poised to take their place in the current showdown over just who's in charge of whom here:

The Automobile Age was a time of profound and rapid change for Conus.  Burgeoning road construction attracted cones, and most left the valleys and the fields to live on the new roads. They flocked to construction work sites, potholes, and other road hazards.  Unfortunately, these new environs did not favor all cones.  Species of grey and black cones that had previously flourished were rendered almost extinct, as automobiles were much less likely to see them upon the asphalt.  Nature began to favor only the brightest and most visible of cones, which tended to be red, yellow, and orange.

Some traffic cones are less tangible.  The Dept. of Justice briefly concluded, for instance, that it would be a good idea to shut down its Amber Alert website as "non-essential," while keeping open the federally-owned golf course favored by our President.  It didn't take long for someone to realize what a bad idea that was, and now the DOJ has crawfished.  In order to make up for the tax expenditures, however, the Dept. of the Interior announced that it would officially withdraw its permission for Old Faithful to operate.

. . . no, of course not

Snopes is all sniffy about the silly story that's circulating claiming that the National Park Service is blocking views of Mt. Rushmore with tarps.

Obviously this picture is photoshopped, you mouth-breathing troglodytes, it explains.  Bad people clearly ginned the story up to create outrage.  Next they'll be saying that NPS personnel put up traffic cones on October 1 to block people from pulling over on the viewing spots on the side of the nearby highways:

OK, admittedly, according to Snopes, that one's sort of true.

The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument. 

The cones first went up Oct. 1, said Dusty Johnson [South Dakota] Gov. Dennis Daugaard's chief of staff.  The state asked that they be taken down, and federal officials did so with some of them.  The state was told the cones were a safety precaution to help channel cars into viewing areas rather than to bar their entrance. 

"I think reasonable people can disagree about that," Johnson said. 

The cones were down again [three days later] as a blizzard hit the Black Hills and plows needed access to the roads, Johnson said.  He said the state would be monitoring to see whether the cones are put back along viewing areas.  "Once the snow's off the ground, we're going to be keeping an eye on how the cones go up," Johnson said.

Breaking the back of summer

Yesterday was in the 90s, but the low this morning dipped in the 50s.  We haven't have lows in the 50's since spring.  Although hot weather surely will return before long, this is the sign that summer doesn't last forever, much as it seems that way after four solid months of opening the front door onto a sauna every morning.

Now we come into the six months of the year that make people want to live here.  A lot of weeding chores have been piling up!  And the neighborhood can resume its spring schedule of outdoor dinners and relaxing on the porch with drinks.

Own goal

It looks as though the Obamacare software simulated a denial-of-service attack on itself, through clumsy architecture.

These are not people we should let creep closer to a monopoly on anything critical to our lives.

An old friend writes . . .

Our esteemed host emailed me to say that his wife is home from the hospital and recovering nicely, though he's still much occupied caring for her.  I know I speak for all of us in expressing my warmest wishes for her speedy return to full health.

Grim also asked me to pass along a request from an old "milblogger" friend of the site that we check out several of her pending projects:

Juliet Akinyi Ochieng author's page

Arlen's Harem:  the second novel

The Kenya Project

Living off the Sea

Whoops, not this week.  You guessed it:  during the shutdown, you won't be allowed to go into some federally controlled waters to fish.  Not, of course, because there's no funding; there's plenty of funding to pay guys to keep you out, even if takes more personnel than letting you in.  Just in hopes that shutting you out will irritate you enough to call your congressman.

What's next:  no breathing, because the EPA has jurisdiction over the air?

Frankly, the whole business underscores what a bad idea it is to get used to freebies from the feds.  Anytime they're in a bad mood, they can restrict access to make a point.  We should be working on making them as unessential as possible.

Mental pretzels

Few subjects stir us to such feats of intellectual gymnastics as explaining how our stereotypes aren't really stereotypes.  This article (via Maggie's Farm) explores how American colleges struggle to explain why an Asian student needs an extra 140 points on his SAT in order to compete effectively with any other race.

Asians are the new Jews.  In the early 20th century, Harvard instituted the revolutionary concept of basing admissions on ethnic-neutral tests.  The result?  Culture shock:

"Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock.  There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater."

Naturally, something had to be done.  One approach would have been overt discrimination against Jews.  A more subtle approach was to emphasize "legacy students," which is an easy way to claim you're not basing admissions on race even though you're basing them on family descent.  It's a good trick, and it's still being used today to keep Asians from unfairly swamping the admissions process by kicking everyone's butt academically.  Other useful techniques are to hide the admissions policy altogether, and to refuse to discuss it on the ground that it's a "wedge issue."  (I've always loved the "wedge issue" gambit.  "Unfair!  This issue is so damaging to our position that it's likely to sow internal dissension in our ranks!")

Another approach is to admit that Asians are submitting academically impressive applications, but to observe that the admissions process is "holistic."  Unfortunately, as the article points out, this approach includes the unstated assumption that Asian applications are, on the whole, devastatingly sub-par on every non-academic ground.  And what exactly is wrong with all of them in that respect?  Well, it's hard to put into words, but it's "holistic." It's certainly not their ethnicity!

There's a strong human tendency to approve of meritocracies as long as we're pretty sure that the rules for judging merit focus on whatever our sub-group happens to be good at.  As soon as those other guys start to excel, it turns out that the rules for judging merit are missing the important intangible stuff, the stuff that's so hard to put into words.

Living off the land

Via Maggie's Farm, a sober look at what it would really take to live as a modern hunter and gatherer long-term--not just for a few days when lost in the wilderness.

Enough about Venezuela

Taranto is funny when he stays away from gender politics.  Well, he's funny then, too, but in a different way.   Here he is on the Great Leap Forward to Health and Solvency:

"People complain of having to stand in line for hours, often in vain, and many are losing patience with the government's explanation that unsavory conspirators are to blame for the nation's problems," reports the New York Times.   But enough about Venezuela.  Let's talk about ObamaCare.

All is not lost, however, despite reporters' increasing and almost fruitless urgency to find someone, anyone, who has successfully signed up for Obamacare via a federal exchange.  (Apparently some of the state exchanges are doing rather well.)  As Taranto points out, it should have been more or less a no-brainer that the feds could set up a successful feeding trough.  The real trick will not be getting impoverished people with expensive illnesses to sign up for subsidized coverage.   The real trick will be getting young, healthy people to sign up in droves in order to foot the bill for all the largesse.  Taranto happily points to a Hartford Courant article that's being trumpeted by "a senior ObamaCare publicity agent" as success, in the form of a 30-year-old law student who managed to navigate a website and sign up for health insurance.   Before we get too excited about bringing that federal deficit under control, though, it's helpful to note that the young student was already paying several hundred dollars a month for coverage, and now will pay nothing at all:  the site informed him that he was eligible for Medicaid.

So the great success story of ObamaCare's first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case.

Well, I've always said that uninsured people who already have an expensive medical condition don't need what we've traditionally called "insurance."  Their risk is no longer unquantifiable; it is known.  What they need is either income or charity.  Charity's a great thing, when it takes the form of people giving up their own resources to help others in need.  It's an ugly thing when it's merely disguised theft.  It's not just that it's dishonest to arrange things dishonestly, though that's bad enough.  It's that dishonesty, by more or less successfully blinding some or all of us to reality, prevents our doing anything to solve a problem in a sustainable way.  The cost of good things doesn't go away because we rob Peter in order to indulge in unearned self-congratulation for our charity to Paul.  It costs real-world time and resources to provide medical care to people who can't afford it.  If it's our duty and desire to do so anyway, it's time we quit pretending it was somebody else's job to pay for it.

Did he really say that?

No, I'm not referring to Harry Reid's spectactularly tone-deaf "Why would we want to do that?" response to a question about funding NIH programs to help children with cancer.  (Why should we help kids with cancer when some government employees are home and not getting a paycheck?)  This is a new one: our President suddenly realizes that a good analogy to the opposition's stance on the spending resolution is a bunch of crazy workers at a factory who decide that if they don't get what they want, they'll shut the factory down. They'd lose their jobs, right? he asks--and rightly so, he implies.

Apocalypse, part 18

Cassandra has helpful statistics at her place about the last 17 shutdowns. The first 16 didn't attract that much media attention. Three guesses what was different in 1995.

Vindictive theater

I think this privately-funded director of volunteers at a "Williamsburg-style" farm (Claude Moore Colonial Farm) has burned her bridges with the National Park Service.  The Williamsburg farm has been entirely self-sustaining since evil Republicans cut its federal funding in 1980.  It costs the federal government nothing to keep it open, but closing the facility costs it the visitor revenues it needs to operate.

According to Anna Eberly, managing director of the farm, NPS sent law enforcement agents to the park on Tuesday evening to remove staff and volunteers from the property. 

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.

Ace posted a copy of her letter, which concludes:

In all the years I have worked with the National Park Service, first as a volunteer for 6 years in Richmond where I grew up, then as an NPS employee at the for 8 very long years and now enjoyably as managing director for the last 32 years - I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS. 

I deeply apologize that we have to disappoint you today by being closed but know that we are working while the National Park Service is not--as usual.

As someone else commented today, next they'll be throwing tarps over Mt. Rushmore.

Waiting

I tried out the healthcare.org site and never managed to log in or raise anyone on "Live Chat," but I did get through on the telephone to a reasonably coherent live operator after a wait of about 20 minutes.  My principal question was whether I could qualify for any HHS-approved catastrophic (high-deductible) policies.  The answer, after some prodding, was no:  I'm not under 30 and I wouldn't qualify for the economic-hardship exceptions to the age limit.  I then asked whether I would be subject to the individual-mandate fine/tax/penalty if I kept my current high-deductible policy, and was assured that I would not be.  Apparently all I have to do is claim on my tax return that I have insurance, and the IRS will take my word for it that it's "insurance" within the HHS's view of what appropriate insurance must be.  Frankly, I don't believe a word of it, but we'll see when I file my tax return next year.

Obviously I'd pay the fine/tax/penalty rather than drop my high-deductible insurance.  My bigger concern is that Blue Cross will quit offering it at all, under pressure from regulators.  At that point, Obamacare will have succeeded in making me much more dependent on government largesse, because all my decades-long care to avoid a lapse in coverage will have been undone, leaving me with pre-existing conditions and an inability to find replacement coverage.

If the purpose of the law is to give me more empathy for people in the gut-churning position of losing insurance that, because of pre-existing health conditions, cannot be replaced, it's succeeding admirably.  In fact, Americans in all walks of life are learning what it means to lose health insurance that was serving them fairly well, all because of this brilliant and compassionate law.

Please wait

Maybe for a long time.

Off For A Bit

Contingencies in the real world compel my absence for a while. I leave the Hall to my companions, with the understanding that you will honor its spirit and observe its customs. I will return.

Cruise control and make like a zipper

Again, from Maggie's Farm:  We are our own worst enemies in traffic.  Besides telecommuting more, two of the best things we could do to improve matters are to quit slamming on the brakes and the accelerator for short-term gain, and to stay in our soon-to-be-closed lane until the last minute, when it actually squeezes into the adjacent lane, then to observe a strict alternation of cars in merging.



The video-talk includes a cartoon with a highway sign reading, "Lanes Closed for No Apparent Reason," which reminds me of how a now-departed friend used to described the situation:  either "Shuttle drill" or "buffing the freeway."

There's some fascinating information about optical illusions in driving and the effect of images, particularly of faces or eyes, on behavior.

Marital sabotage

Focus on the Family (via Maggie's Farm) offers what seems like sensible advice for preparation for success in marriage, with five easy  mistakes to avoid:  (1) cohabitation, (2) taking on debt, (3) marrying an unbeliever, (4) avoiding counseling before or after marriage, and (5) dreaming of a soul mate.  I have to say, though, that I broke most of these rules and came out all right.  I obeyed a couple:  We never took on much debt, I guess I can say that for us, and I never really looked at things in terms of a single possible "soul mate" in the sense of one person on the planet who was my "split-apart."  Otherwise, complete failure on (1), (3), and (4).

I suspect you can get away with cohabitation and marrying unbelievers (we both were) as long as you have a deep and abiding faith in pairing up and staying paired up.  I'm not sure where we got that, but it's been a bedrock for us.  As far as counseling goes, however, my husband would be equally likely to take a year off and join and ashram after having his entire body tattooed in paisley.

Color-blindness

Following up on Grim's color test:

Obviously both my husband and I have a good deal of color acuity, but his is on a higher plane than mine.  It's something like tone pitch acuity:   my sense of relative sound pitch is good enough to let me improvise and sing harmony, but my grasp of absolute pitch is fuzzy and intermittent.  People with real absolute pitch simply know what the tone is without hesitation, in or out of context, whether they've heard it recently or not.   My husband's color acuity is like perfect pitch: he knows the color when he sees it and continues to know it when he's not looking at it any more, whereas I have to have the two colors together in order to judge--though if I can see them together, I know the difference with confidence.

Color-blindness is a deficiency in one of the three kinds of cones in the retina, each of which specializes in a particular freqency range.  "Blindness" is perhaps not a very accurate term, because the impairment of cone function can occur all along the spectrum from barely detectable to complete; it's nothing like a simple on/off switch.  The problem with the cones is usually a sex-linked congenital condition, meaning it results from an area on the X-chromosome and therefore manifests more often in men (8% to women's 0.5%) because they haven't got a second X-chromosome to mask it.   Women would have to have the gene on both X-chromosomes in order to manifest the deficit.   Of course, they remain carriers, so a common pattern of inheritance is from grandfather to grandson.

One never knows about the evo-pop explanations for these things, but Wiki has these interesting observations to offer:

Some studies conclude that color blind people are better at penetrating certain color camouflages.  Such findings may give an evolutionary reason for the high prevalence of red–green color blindness.  And there is also a study suggesting that people with some types of color blindness can distinguish colors that people with normal color vision are not able to distinguish.

When I was a child, my sisters and I were fascinated with the little book of Ishihara color-blindness tests that were on my father's shelf.  They're available on the Internet now, of course:

Wiki says that one of the earliest color-blindness tests was created in response to the Lagerlunda train crash of 1875 in Sweden.  Because Physiologist Alarik Frithiof Holmgren suspected that the train engineer's color-blindness caused him to misinterpret a warning signal, he used skeins of dyed wool fiber to test the ability to distinguish colors.  This site discusses even earlier works dating back to the 17th century.

Here's an interesting online test that's like the one Grim posted, but with more specific diagnostic results.  I experimented with this one.   To me, there's only one way to arrange the colors, no matter how many times I do it, and apparently it agrees with the site's notion of the ideal arrangement.   I tried randomly introducing errors to see if I could understand the diagnostic tools, but I guess the errors have to fall into a standard pattern to make it work.

I was taught as a child that red-green color-blindness was just one of the possibilities, which happens to be the most common because of the likely failure of one of the three kinds of rod.  There should be two other theoretical possibilities in addition to [blue/yellow-red] a/k/a [green/red], which are: [yellow/red-blue] a/k/a [orange/blue], and [red/blue-yellow] a/k/a [purple/yellow].   This site assures me that the categories of potential dysfunction are considerably different, and that "red-green color-blindness" is something of a misnomer, though it is in fact the most common type. Taking "red-green colorblindness" as a generic term for protanopia (red-blindness), protanomaly (red- weakness), deuteranopia (green-blindness), and deuteranomaly (green-weakness), it accounts for about 99% of all color-blindness.  This downloadable book is full of interesting facts, such as the following:

-- Approximately every 500st handshake is between two colorblind people. 

-- It is almost sure (probability: 94%) that at least one member of a football team is colorblind. 

-- If you pick out 100 persons, the chance is very low (about 1.5%) that none of them is colorblind.

 If that link doesn't work, the free download can be triggered from here.

There's a possibility of gene-therapy treatment in the works.  It's said to work brilliantly in squirrel monkeys, but is still undergoing safety testing in animals before it can be tried in humans.  What would it be like suddenly to be able to detect a new range of colors?  It's reasonably well established, I take it, that some organisms are tetrachromatic; i.e., distinguish four peaks of color frequency to our three.  Some people think a certain percentage of humans are tetrachromatic.  In addition, although the normal cornea filters out UV light, people lacking a cornea reportedly can perceive the lower ranges of UV light as a separate bluish-white color.  They can see in something like a more full octave, with the frequency of the high-purple color nearly twice that of the lower-purple end of the rainbow.  Do the colors look as similar to them as high- and low-C sound to us?

Gandalf! And Gandalf Means Me!

Since I apparently don't have anything important to say this week, how about another quiz?

All the Colors

...but can you put them into proper order? It's a very difficult test. Lower scores are better.

Mr. Wolf Sends

This guy has an interesting point, which he takes a long time to reach, about the way in which our society has come to run down the dignity of work. Along the way you get to learn two ways to castrate a lamb, which some of you may already know.



He goes on to explain and apologize, sort of, in the recorded remarks here. His account of the conference is not at all flattering, and he wasn't taking it at all seriously, but apparently there was plenty of wine. I think Wolf liked the explanation better than the video.

Oh, Dear

"Aristotle for Bros" is a bad idea. However, like many bad ideas, its time has come.

Panzer rat

Last night one of my less-trained dogs (none of them is impressive) went out after dark and declined to come back to my call, preferring instead to root enthusiastically about in a densely jungly part of the garden.  We've had a cottonmouth or two hanging around near the house lately, so I wasn't about to jump in there and drag her out.  While I was standing a few feet away, wondering if I should go get a whistle or a flashlight, something burst out and ran over my feet.  What a squeal I gave, before bursting into laughter!  It was our friend the Panzer Rat, and he was a lot unhappier about the situation than I was.

As Phil Robertson says (I know, you don't watch TV and have never heard of him, so just take my word for it):  "That's what happens when you marry a yuppie woman and move to the suburbs.  You get skeert by a possum."  I didn't marry a yuppie woman--I am a yuppie woman--and I grew up in the suburbs, having moved to this semi-rural area only a few years ago.  I can't say I was terrified, but it was a definite "Yikes" moment.

(Phil's comment when a realtor tries to sell him on the joys of a new house in an upscale subdivision, adjacent to "5,000 beautiful acres":  "The problem is, someone else owns the 5,000 acres, and he put a golf-course on it.")

Incidentally, the armadillo picture reminded me strongly of a picture I hadn't seen since I was a teenager.  I remembered that it was an illustration on a poster for Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros."  I spent many a happy teenaged hour trying to reproduce that picture in pen and ink; to this day every detail of it is familiar to me.  Browsing Google images, I'm pretty sure that the poster employed this old woodcut.  Even now, looking at it makes me want to start doodling:

T II

The soul of wit

Brevity.

The taxman runneth

The IRS is in full retreat from the lawsuit filed by "True the Vote" over the IRS's unconscionable obstruction of its tax-exempt status:  it has agreed to grant the requested status after an indefensible delay of three years and has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit as a result.  In other news, Lois ("I take the Fifth") Lerner is going from taking a paycheck for being more or less permanently sidelined by scandal to taking a check for retirement benefits for having been such an awful political operative for many years.

If the point of asking to dismiss the lawsuit was to avoid all that messy and embarrassing discovery, I have to wonder if Ms. Lerner's retirement isn't part of the same thinking, since it's much harder to get discovery from an ex-employee.  Can you imagine the ugly stuff that must be sitting in those files?

Instapundit points to this article in the New York Times: The Messy-Kitchen, Parking Spot War

He describes it as "Liberal Mother Syndrome".

Me, I just think the lady is stupid.

I sometimes wonder if the NYT isn't just trolling everyone with items like these, as they are bound to get all sorts of commentary on the thing.

Right on schedule

The people's paradise of Venezuela continues to follow the script with eerie faithfulness.  Control "abusive" prices, watch shortages develop, decry the shortages, punish hoarders, and finally:  nationalize the industry in the name of ensuring the people's right to access.  This week it's the manufacture of toilet paper.

Pythagoras Lives!

It's all math, maybe. Just like he thought.

Democracy and Modernism

The problem with modernism, in art, is that it's too hard:

Beckett wrote “unenjoyable” books, says Martin Amis. Paulo Coelho believes Joyce’s Ulysses caused “great harm,” while Roddy Doyle doubts any readers are “really moved by it.” “Shabby chic” is the Financial Times’ verdict on modernist architecture. You hear it often these days, this grousing about difficult, pretentious modernism: Woolf, Kafka, Stein, and Picasso come in for it too. The emperor has no clothes. The flight from modernism—we know the names but skirt the works—may be a sign of the cultural times, a symptom of our special mix of fatigue, cynicism, and complacency. And then, of course, the art can indeed try your patience and stamina. Its demands are relentless; these are creations that decline to traffic in reassurance or open themselves to clicks and scans.

It's the opening of a book review on works produced in 1922, when modernism was still a rising force. But I wonder if the real problem isn't the one the critics append. Maybe it wasn't that the art was so challenging, but that it wasn't beautiful. The True and the Beautiful share a link that somehow know at basic levels of our being. We work hard for the beautiful because we can see its value, we know there is something of worth that deserves the work. Even when it is beyond us, as Kant said of the sublime, we try to grasp its truth though we are doomed to fail.

With modernism the challenge is purely intellectual, and relatively few are interested in that kind of challenge. That's not hidden praise for the art, as it is often taken to be -- "Only a select few can understand." It's a kind of hidden criticism, a democratic one.

UPDATE: Link missing before, fixed.

"You Played Yourself"

We give the man a hard time, but Ice-T had something to say even twenty years ago.

A Good Essay

Sarah Hoyt writes on a familiar problem. The title of the article sounds like she might be taklig She manages to articulate something that I hadn't quite sorted out until I read it, which is contained here:

And yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters. The problem is they aren’t. Not even when they’re raised to act that way. The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it. Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag. Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.

This is really the problem, isn't it? Generally I don't have any problem with women I know who self-identify as feminists: in fact, usually I like them, as I usually like tough-minded people who will argue with me.

I may think they are wrong on the facts or wrong in interpretation. Yet in the last few years I've realized that the real feminists are working it out for themselves, and left to it will eventually come around. There's nothing I can say that will convince them, but the feminist historians working in (say) medieval studies are looking hard for examples of tough women making their own way in the world. And looking for them, they're finding them -- everywhere they look. It may take a while to turn over the old orthodoxy of 'the patriarchy,' and they certainly aren't trying to do it, but at some point the weight of the evidence they are producing day by day is going to force them to take a second look at their guiding mythology.

And that's good. It's great, in fact. It's a tremendous service to human understanding of the past, and I'm excited to see it flowering before us. I enjoy reading their articles, lit with the joy of discovering a kindred spirit in yet another one of their ancestors. It fills me with hope that, one day when they're ready, we'll be able to talk anew about the blessed legacy we received who were lucky enough to be descended from the Men and Women of the West.

So far, so good. But the men: or 'men,' more appropriately. They aren't worth spit. The only thing that keeps them from getting smacked in the jaws on a regular basis is the profound sense of pity you can't help but have for them. They are worthless, pathetic creatures -- until, like the Ayers of her example, they work out their sleaze on someone else.

The young women, I think, will work themselves out in time.

The young men need to come back in under the weight of the -- well, 'patriarchy' isn't quite right. The Brotherhood. They need to fall back in under the mastery of better men than they are, so they might become brothers and better men themselves. The best of their nature does not come naturally. It is a product of long and ancient art.

The Scarecrow

The new diplomacy

Handy expressions

From a 1922 Spanish-English dictionary being processed now at Project Gutenberg.  How impoverished English is, to lack a verb for the act of giving a blow with an aubergine.

berenjenaza, f. blow with an aubergine. 

buzcorona, f. playful buffet to head of one who is respectfully kissing the hand. 

candileja, f. oil receptacle of a lamp.--pl. foot-lights of a theatre; (bot.) willow-herb, deadly carrot. 

cartapel, m. memorandum filled with useless matter. 

cascapiñones, m. one who shells hot pine-nuts and cleans the seed; pine-nut cracker. 

cascaruleta, f. (coll.) noise made by the teeth when chucked under the chin. 

casiller, m. in the royal palace, servant who empties the close-stools. 

casorio, m. (coll.) inconsiderate marriage; informal wedding. 

cejijunto, ta, a. having eye-brows that meet. 

celia, f. beverage made of wheat; a beer. 

centímano, na a. (poet.) having a hundred hands. 

cigoñal, m. well-sweep. 

cimillo, m. flexible twig on which a decoy-pigeon is tied. 

cinca, f. any infraction of the rules of the game of nine-pins (ten-pins) 

cisque, (coll.) to besmear, to dirty.--vr. to ease nature 

coche parado, balcony over a street full of persons. 

codal, a. cubital, one cubit long: palo codal, stick hung round the neck as a penance. 

codazo, m. blow with the elbow; a hunch. 

cogotazo, m. slap on the back of the neck. 

cojitranco, ca, a. nickname for evil-disposed lame persons. 

cola de boca, lip glue. 

colear, va. (Mex.) in bull-fights, to take the bull by the tail, while on horseback, and, by suddenly starting the horse, to overturn him; (S. Amer.) to fell a bull by twisting his tail. 

colillero, ra, a. person who gathers cigar stubs for a trade. 

colmillada, f. injury made by an eye-tooth. 

cominear, vn. (coll.) to meddle in trifles or occupations belonging to women. 

componte, secret order by which an obnoxious person is done away with. 

consentido, a. applied to a spoiled child; applied to a cuckold by his own consent.

Autumn, Minus A Week

The summer is dying in front of our eyes.  Better times, friends.  Better times are coming.

A Song of Plasma

Humanity reaches interstellar space.

The Race Is Not To The Swift

Tonight was a good night for the kind of small-town high-school football around which so much of American culture is built.  The closest small town large enough for a football team is the county seat, and it is so small by local standards that it very rarely carries the day.  The players are as strong as they usually grow in farm country, but there is more to the game than strength and speed.

I am teaching the rules to a young person who is growing in appreciation of the sport.  At the end of the first quarter, while the score was still tied, I asked him which team was going to win and why.  He answered that he thought the visiting team had better plays.  "That's right," I said.  "Their offensive strategy is much more sophisticated, and it is unlikely our team can adapt to it quickly enough.  Nor do we have a similar strategy that will let us match them.  They will likely win easily."

"But not for certain," he said.

"No," I agreed, remembering the verse from Ecclesiastes.  There were three quarters left, and time and chance happen to us all, but so it proved.

Guests

What better reason to clean things up than guests arriving in great numbers over the next few weeks?  We've spraywashed the outside of the house, touched up some trim on the porch, repainted old peeling patio furniture and put new cushions on it, and cleaned up any number of horrors in the house.  The spare bedroom becomes such a dump when there's no one planning to sleep in it.  My husband had the bright idea of squeezing my hundreds of skeins of yarn into those vacuum packages that attach to the vacuum cleaner, because I'm on a tiny-tiny white thread crochet kick and probably won't need to get to my yarn for years.  Boxes of this and that left the house for the local thrift store, ladders were climbed in aid of cleaning years' worth of dust off of the tops of windows, doors, light fixtures, and ceiling fans, and corners were de-grimed with toothbrushes.  We're nearly presentable!

Help Kickstart World War III

This sounds fantastic! We could have another 'Greatest Generation'!

Or, you know, part of one, anyway.

9/11 Annual Repost: "Enid & Geraint"

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

The Ignorance of History

Black NRA from Sarah Silverman

Let's have a short history lesson on the origin of the National Rifle Association, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The National Rifle Association was first chartered in the state of New York on November 17, 1871 by Army and Navy Journal editor William Conant Church and General George Wood Wingate. Its first president was Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, who had worked as a Rhode Island gunsmith, and Wingate was the original secretary of the organization. Church succeeded Burnside as president in the following year.

Union Army records for the Civil War indicate that its troops fired about 1,000 rifle shots for each Confederate soldier hit, causing General Burnside to lament his recruits: "Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn." The generals attributed this to the use of volley tactics, devised for earlier, less accurate smoothbore muskets.

Recognizing a need for better training, Wingate traveled to Europe and observed European armies' marksmanship training programs. With plans provided by Wingate, the New York Legislature funded the construction of a modern range at Creedmore, Long Island, for long-range shooting competitions. Wingate then wrote a marksmanship manual.

Got that? The NRA was founded by Civil War Union military leaders who recognized that northern prowess with rifles was lacking in the late war with more-rural Southerners. The purpose of the organization was to train potential soldiers in case it became necessary again to suppress a Southern independence movement.

Another mission it took on was arming and training Freedmen in the South. Don't take my word for it.



You can see the full version here.

The NRA was always "the Black NRA." They went to some trouble and expense, from the very beginning, to be just that thing. I would wonder at this shocking ignorance, except that it is such a piece of the historical ignorance of our gentle and generous friends on the Left.

For Those Of You In The Mighty 9th

As you know if you've been watching the last week with an eye for it, Congressman Doug Collins is sounding like a pretty serious "No" at this point on Syria. He's holding a telephone town hall tomorrow night to talk about it with anyone from the district who wants to call in.

This week, I returned to Washington for the House Foreign Affairs Committee's special hearing on Syria. This was the opportunity for Secretary Kerry, Secretary Hagel, and General Dempsey to make President Obama's case for why we should pursue military intervention in Syria. As I said at the time, I left that room with more questions than answers, and I don't believe they made their case.
You can see video of my questions in that hearing here, but tomorrow night, I want to hear your questions.
I'm holding a telephone town hall meeting to talk about Syria on Monday night. The call will start at approximately 7:25 PM, and you are welcome to call in if we don't call you first. The phone number is877-229-8493 and the passcode you'll need to enter is 111377.

I've said what I have to say about it at BLACKFIVE.

Getting one's bearings

One of my husband's war-gaming buddies provided him with this link.  An unusually impenetrable lecture on missile guidance, or an explanation of the rhetorical style of our foreign policy as recently announced?  You be the judge.

Bits of a Good Day

 

And then the local Oktoberfest (of which my photos have been seized by the NSA -- or, beer prevented me from properly saving. Whichever).

Bier of the night: Paulaner Oktoberfest.
Best song of the night: a xydeco piece with yodeling.
Best line of the night: in the middle of a (different) yodeling piece, the singer calls out "Everyone! Sing along!"

Prost, y'all!

History and Abduction

I think this is a really neat paper, a Master's Thesis from Canada.  It shines light on two very different debates:  a debate within the field of history about the reality of abductions in Medieval England, and our current debate over the value of higher education.

On the question of abductions, the author has taken the tactic of examining fifty court cases with surviving documentation.  The result casts some of our assumptions in a new light.

Both the finding and the method casts some light on our discussions about the value of higher education.  Many have argued, on reasonably good grounds, that higher education no longer provides the same value to students that it has in the past.  Education past the bachelor's degree, and particularly in the humanities, is especially subject to this line of attack.

There is one thing, though, that all these extra history and literature majors are doing:  they enable us to go over the historical record with a fine-tooth comb to a degree never before possible.  The value to the students may be questioned, but the value to the rest of us -- as long as these programs continue to produce students who perform quality research -- is not always adequately considered.  We really benefit from these minute but significant adjustments in our understanding of the past.

(H/t:  Medievalists.)

The High Woods, In Sunshine and In Shadow

Building zaps citizens

London now features a building with a curved glass wall that acts as a solar lens strong enough to melt plastic on parked cars.

A military "Onion"

Bookworm is right:  I didn't even get past the titles before I laughed out loud:

[A] friend of mine directed me to a site called The Duffle Blog, which is a military satire site. It's dedicated to churning out such articles as "US Praises Massacre Of Syrian Civilians Without Use Of Chemical Weapons" [and] "Admin Error Sends Bradley Manning to Death Row, Nidal Hasan to Gender Reassignment Surgery." Even the title is funny.

The article about Hasan and Manning was filed by one of the Korean Airline pilots, apparently.  New since Bookworm's post: John Kerry Announces Protest of Syrian Conflict As Soon As He Finishes Starting It.