"On the Right"

Motes, beams, boys.

The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo last year. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

All I’d add at this point is that it’s not terribly surprising that people who think of much of the policy legacy of the twentieth century as a betrayal of the very purpose of America—and even as defiance of the Divine Will—would view liberals in the dehumanizing way that participants in an actual shooting war so often exhibit

C'mon. 'We have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it,' 'I won,' Rules for Radicals, 'This war is lost,' the IRS targeting conservative groups, Fast and Furious....

There's a war coming, maybe. Maybe it's already here. But don't lose sight of the fact that, if we do find ourselves at war, it's a war you wanted all along.

States Against The NSA

Those guys at the Tenth Amendment Center have an interesting suggestion for states that don't like what the NSA is doing. The Federal government controls the NSA, but the states control the water...

When fully operational, the NSA facility is expected to require a staggering 1.7 million gallons of water every day to cool down the computers harvesting information on people worldwide. That water is supplied by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the state. Without it, the facility cannot function.

Accidents Happen

Heh.

American Foreign Policy

Mac Owens is not impressed.

How Should A Woman Appear In Public?

A survey of several Muslim nations by Pew. The top-line is interesting, but scroll down for the percentage answering that women should be allowed to choose.

The Gates Book

Initial reports suggest we're going to be pretty angry.

There is a letter of dubious authenticity but clear and understandable feeling. The circumstances of the day are not out of line with the contents, but it is so perfectly expressed for our time that one doubts it could be real. Probably it is false; as far as I can tell it dates to a French-language book from the period of the mutiny of the 1er REP of the Foreign Legion. Yet in a way it is more dire if it is a product of our time than of ancient Rome.

"We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence, so many benefits brought by us to populations in need of our assistance and our civilisation.

"We were able to verify that all this was true, and, because it was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regretted nothing, but whereas we over here are inspired by this frame of mind, I am told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery flourishes, and that many people in their uncertainty and confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment and vilify our action.

"I cannot believe that all this is true and yet recent wars have shown how pernicious such a state of mind could be and to where it could lead.

"Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow-citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire. "If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions!!"

It's not just Afghanistan, of course.

Sir Run Run Shaw

He's most famous for Kung Fu films, but also produced Blade Runner. You can see his name in the fine print on this trailer.



The trailer is terrible. It's a wonder anyone went to see it. Good they did, though.

Rest in peace.

The Glories of Black Iron

Against last night's cold, we hung up blankets to wrap off the main living room where the iron stove is. I went ahead and shut off all the water and drained the pipes, so there was no danger from freezing -- that's how we used to do it when we lived in the mountain cabin, which froze whole months of the year. The fire inside the iron stove kept us all very warm, except the horses who are quite capable of handling far colder weather than this polar blast. They got extra hay and a ration of grain to help keep warm.

Today I decided to roast some pork in the oven because that's an all-day, low-heat process. It's helped to fill the house with a bit of warmth, as well as some wonderful smells. Once it was finished, I made some honey-wheat bread from scratch, with a bit of cinnamon just for the smell of it baking.

Black iron, in the stove and the roasting pan, has made this shock of cold a great deal better. That and some of the firewood I spent so much of last year laying in, of course.

Ouch

It's bound to work better than what the State Department and the White House have had going lately.

"Harmless" Pranks

I'm definitely going to do #9 one of these days.

More hate speech

Here someone goes again, making moral judgments that equate ordinary human behavior with disgusting habits like bestiality--or, in this case, pedophilia.  (Wait, is pedophilia still eligible for disapproval, or is that hate speech, too? )  Somehow, though, I doubt anyone's going to call for a boycott of Morrissey on the ground of his targeting carnivores with intolerance and judgmentalism, even though my carnivorous nature is not a choice, I was born that way.

It would be interesting to know what he thinks about abortion.

The monetary leap for freedom

I suppose they'll be cracking down on bitcoins soon.  It's the unregulated Wild West out there!  (These people always talk as if the Wild West were a bad thing.)

The things we find to complain about

Almost every day I see an article explaining why some group or another has no choice but to become obese.  Here's an article about how farmers are too rushed and stressed to eat anything but junk food.  It takes too long to wash the dirt off the greens!  We have to eat donuts instead!

I eat good food, I think, but that won't keep the weight down if the volume is too great in relation to my meager caloric needs.  Is that my society, or me?

Federalism

This is what happens when you let states try out different things:  people get ideas about what works best, even if that means changing a lifetime of prejudice.

The enduring fascination of marriage

An enterprising author/nerd went through Netflix's exhaustive survey of its customers' fine-grained movie genre preferences, which might be called the "Movie Genome Project," and established that the clear winner in moviegoers' collective hearts is stories about marriage.  If you count parenthood, reunited lovers, and couples, the old boy-meets-girl story accounts for four of the top six viewer preferences.  As a friend of mine once put it, "I've had the ass ever since I figured out I was a fall guy for DNA."

After marriage, royalty is an enduring preoccupation.  Further research revealed that the hands-down favorite chronological context is the 1980s, followed in descending order by earlier decades.  (Movies set in 1990 forward might as well not exist.)  The favorite geographical setting, by a large margin, is Europe.

Wondering what ever happened to murder mysteries, war dramas, and spy thrillers?  The author reconstructed 90,000+ outrageously specific and obscure genres identified by Netflix in its attempt to capture the sort of movies their customers prefer.  Experimentation with a genre-yielding algorithm yielded gems like "Fight-the-System Political Love Triangle Mysteries."  It reminds me of a friend who described "The Shawshank Redemption" as the "feel-good prison movie of the year."  A favorite of my husband's and mine always has been "Only One Man," a/k/a "They Jacked with the Wrong Guy."

How Capitalist is North Korea?

The Chosun Ilbo provides an interesting answer: plus or minus 80% capitalist, in the sense of black market. The government-dominated sector has failed so badly that most people look elsewhere.

More than 80 percent of North Koreans are apparently buying and selling goods in the black market or engaging in other commercial activities to make ends meet, learning about free market economics.... One study based on 2009 census data suggests that 83 percent of North Koreans or 14.48 million derive some of their income from commercial activity. In North Hamgyong Province, which suffered heavily from famines, the figure is nearer 93 percent, and even in Pyongyang, which still has a functioning ration system, the proportion is 56 percent.

Another study by Seoul National University finds that 70 percent of North Korean defectors had experience selling goods in open-air markets or other commercial activity. And that applies even to 68 percent of defectors who were privileged members of the Workers Party.

The younger, the more experience they had, with 92.3 percent in their 30s and 88.2 percent in their 40s.

Defectors said their main sources of income were retail sales (37.2 percent), earning foreign currency (11.1 percent), reselling products at higher prices (eight percent) and manual labor (7.1 percent).

Hardly any said their main source of income was payments earned working in state-run factories, and 42.2 percent said they received no handouts from the state.

These are percentages that aren't that different from our own, where about 8 percent work for the government directly, but about 49% receive some form of government income. Of course, our statistics aren't designed to factor in the black market: if you worked in the population of illegal aliens, and those involved in our various black market enterprises (including tax-not-paid cash retail sails at things like flea markets), we'd probably be a little more capitalist than the official statistics suggest.

Still, very interesting. Socialism was one of the big problems in reconstructing Iraq, because farmers lacked the skills to plan their own planting (let alone the skills to estimate what crops were best). They were given orders from a central bureaucracy, along with seeds. If the vast majority of the DPRK's subject population has cut free of all that, the road ahead may not be quite as dark as you'd otherwise suspect for them.

Let's hope it's all true. And up the black market!

Little Sisters, Local 316

This is an exceptional parody from Scrappleface.

The Madness of 'Equality of Respect'

I generally find Mickey Kaus to be a keen observer especially of politics, so I am somewhat alarmed to find that this post he endorsed so fondly strikes me as the biggest crock of nonsense I have read in quite some time. It begins with a preposterous misreading of a set of observed facts.

I had this realization (as with so many others) while living in Japan. I first noticed it when I was sitting in a "kaiten-zushi" restaurant, watching some cooks chop fish. It was robotic, repetitive work, about as difficult - and about as well-paid - as flipping burgers. But my Japanese friend referred to one of those cooks as "sushi-ya-san", meaning "Mr. Sushi Chef". She used the honorific reflexively, not patronizingly or sarcastically. The respect for this low-paid, low-skilled worker was reflexive, automatic. I suddenly wondered if we could get Americans to start calling burger-flippers "sir". The thought made me laugh.

There are other ways in which the customs of Japanese society work to encourage equal respect.

"Equal respect" in Japanese society? This is the culture which has codes governing the right way for social unequals to bow to one another that are so rigorous and tightly defined that schools of international business etiquette often don't even try to teach them. The proper calibration of status is reflected in depth and duration of one's bow to the other. It is the most rigidly formal stratification of any culture I have ever encountered.

The advice you will get as an outsider is to try to bow 'equal depth, equal duration' when meeting your Japanese business contact. This will generally be accepted, but it is not in any way a gesture of equality of respect. Rather, they accept it as a kind of recognition that gaijin are simply incapable of behaving in a fully civilized manner. From them, the acceptance is intended as a magnanimous offer of charity; from you, the bow is intended as a kind of supplication, a widow's mite of courtesy that, while in no sense adequate, is the best you can do given your unfortunate circumstances.

The reason Japanese society refers to the sushi chef with an honorific is because he accepts his place. In return for knowing his place, he is not treated with open disrespect -- what would be the point of that? You need not enforce submission on someone who accepts it and demonstrates his acceptance openly.

"No one discusses how much money anyone makes," he goes on to say. "Displays of wealth are a major taboo[.]" But observe their reactions upon trading business cards.

By these things I do not mean to criticize Japanese society, which has its own beauty and despair. I mean to say that the initial observation is so flawed that one ought not to try to draw any lessons from it.

What sense does it make to talk of 'equality' of respect in any case? Is it equal like you have equal rights under the law? The reason you can talk about human equality in that sense -- it is the only way in which it is possible to talk about humans as equals and avoid speaking nonsense -- is that there is a single source for the rights you have under the law, which creates those rights the same way for every entity. Respect is not like that. Respect is not the creation of a single source, but is created (or not) by each individual you encounter. Some will elect to respect you more than others. You don't even get equal respect with yourself: how much respect you get depends on whom you ask. (Free advice: ask your dog.)

Is it equal like a measure of sugar or cracked red wheat? If so, it should be fungible. If I haven't any of my own today I can substitute a cup from my neighbor, and when I later replace it her situation will be no different than before the exchange. Can I then substitute the respect I have for you for the respect I have for my mother?

Of course not, and the example is intended to begin showing why. Respect follows from relationships. The respect you owe your mother is not merely unequal to the respect you owe someone else, it is categorically different from the respect you owe someone else -- your wife, your first sergeant, an older gentleman, a polite stranger. It is nonsense to speak of respect in terms of equalities.

But let's say we get the category correct, because we hold the relationship stable. Let's talk more about your first sergeant. Most likely over the course of time you'd have more than one. They share the same relationship with you (assuming you don't change ranks or positions yourself, which for this example we will assume). Now, within that category, do you owe them equal respect?

Of course not again. One of them may be a great NCO, who looks after his unit, puts his soldiers before himself, and helps make sure that you achieve your mission. He is devoted to making sure you get home in one piece, prepared to go on to greater things. The other one may be a lousy loudmouth who throws his people under the bus for personal ease or advancement.

If we hold the relationship stable, then, we can talk about respect in terms of more and less. Equality of respect becomes possible if and only if we have a stable relationship. But equality is not at all someone's due. Respect is earned.

We may rightly say that Americans don't evaluate respect correctly, which causes them to fail to respect people who have a genuine claim -- the hard worker at a poor-paying job who is pulling his own weight, for example. There's a relationship there that is not being treated with the respect it is due.

But drop the nonsense about equality, let alone 'redistribution' of respect. Equality of respect is a bad concept.

Welcome, Magpul

Wyoming and Texas probably are using unfair competitive practices.

The Right Season to Leave

It's Fine, But It's Not Marriage

Dr. Althouse cites a subject of interest to that genuine philosopher Bertrand Russell, which she follows him in calling "Companionate Marriage." The setup is whether it can be right for a man who has no sexual interest in a woman to marry her, simply because she will be a good life companion, but with the clear understanding that there will be no sex.

There is no reason why you shouldn't form a relationship with someone that is life-long, companionable, and sex-free. If you also should elect to live together, and hold property in common, and pursue a life together... well, none of that is wrong either. In fact there are many societies of this type, often with very many partners (for example, some religious orders operate with common property and an understanding that you will be a companion to your brothers or sisters and take care of them if they get sick or old).

Indeed, it's Aristotle's description of true friendship -- common interests, so that the friend is like 'another self,' so much so that you live together and share property. Aristotle assumed this state both could and often would co-exist with marriages, so that families united by common purposes might come to hold property in common (something like a proto-corporate body built on family ties). There's certainly no moral reason you shouldn't do this if it is acceptable to all parties. Obviously if you form such a society with unmarried people, it would require the consent of all parties also for them to marry insofar as that would entitle their spouse to an interest in the common property; but if it is handled as a kind of corporation, the common property of the society of friendship might not be touched by the marriage at all.

You can both marry and form a corporation with a business partner, even one whose sole purpose is to provide for lifelong companionship. If you should not marry otherwise, that's fine too. But if you should happen to produce a child with some third party, your business partner is not on the hook for it unless she chooses to be. The mother (or father) of that child has the responsibilities and duties that would have gone with any other out-of-wedlock birth.

Or you could construct such a society with a vow of celibacy, and a pledge not to marry. That's even more like a religious order.

All of this is fine. What isn't moral is to confuse it with marriage. That is immoral because destroying the legal distinction between non-marital forms and marriage means that courts will have to treat both kinds of unions as the same under the law. That means that precedents in marriage law -- which are of the utmost importance especially to children -- will begin to be distorted by the non-marital unions that are legally treated as if they were marriages.

The same issue applies to same-sex unions, as far as I am concerned. You can form a society of friendship if you want; it can have whatever by-laws you want it to have. That's an exercise of freedom that of course no one ought to deny you. Just remember that a same-sex union is not exactly the same as marriage, and collapsing the distinction is going to have harmful effects by forcing the courts to treat them as if they were. That will create precedents that will distort the marriage law, which will harm especially the children of traditional marriages.

Do what you want. Just maintain the distinctions.

That's Kind Of You, Ma'am, But We Really Can't Take The Credit

A professor who teaches constitutional law courses at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice penned a Christmas Day essay blaming “southern White radicals” for the disastrous, slow-motion train wreck failure that has been the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

I'd love to think that those of us who are utterly, totally opposed to this government takeover of health care have had a leading role in destroying it. It'd be nice to think so, because this bill was passed not only over our objections but in absolute defiance of every elected official we sent to Washington. Not one single vote for the bill came from us. How nice if there were a price for that.

The truth is, they got there wholly on their own. They didn't seek our support because they didn't need it, and having rammed this through both houses of Congress (and gotten a compliant Supreme Court to rewrite it so it sort-of passes Constitutional muster), they built it all on their own. Whenever they chose, they made unilateral changes to the law via executive mandates from the President or HHS.

It's their baby, front to back. The problems it has are not, alas, any fault of ours.

State Secession

Paleofuture offers a map of an America where all the proposed state secession movements had succeeded.

Probably the easiest way to enjoy playing with the map is to think about where you live, and whether the proposal makes sense. (Severing North Georgia from South Georgia is defensible because the two are quite distinct culturally, for reasons that follow from the kinds of agriculture enabled by the physical landforms: the proposal looks like it follows the fall line between the foothills and mountains on the one hand, and the coastal plain down to the tidewaters on the other).

Second easiest? Try to figure out how the composition of the Senate would change. Better? Worse?

Global Warming Update

The Manitoba Museum is reporting Winnipeg's temperatures on Tuesday were actually as cold as the surface of Mars.

According to the Curiosity Rover, Mars reached a maximum temperature of -29 C on Tuesday, a temperature Winnipeg only reached shortly before 3 p.m.

New Years' Even festivals mostly continued as planned, except for the horse-drawn carriages. It was too cold for the horses.

Unemployment

Via Rhymes with Cars and Girls, an interesting article and comments about the "Prideful Worker" effect; i.e., the worker who's above taking the work that's available.

My parents and their siblings came of age in the Depression, when there was no such thing as this.  It was root, hog, er die; the "hunger" issue that's so casually thrown about in modern America was quite real for them.  My generation is more inclined to be picky, which it's possible to be if you have another source of income:  a family member with a job, government benefits, or independent means from savings or inheritance.

The article touches on the "Non-relocating Worker," too--someone who could find work in booming North Dakota but won't move there for whatever reason.  A commenter noted that moving isn't always an option for someone with a family member with a good job.  It's a dilemma that can't be grappled with effectively unless the whole family considers itself a unit, and is really up against it economically.  Our ancestors uprooted themselves, sometimes leaving behind part or all of their families if necessary, and took big chances on a new world.  Would they have done it if they'd had unemployment checks to live on?  I doubt I would have.  It takes the wolf at the door to get me to work at anything but crochet and Project Gutenberg.

Songs for the New Year

That one is particularly beautiful. A good song to start the night.

Of course, for many this will be the last night of Christmas celebrations.



By the end of the night, we have returned to the first song, but with different words. Not 'new' words, for these are quite old.



The full lyrics:

The old year now away is fled,
The new year it is entered;
Then let us all our sins down tread,
And joyfully all appear.
Let's merry be this holiday,
And let us run with sport and play,
Hang1 sorrow, let's cast care away
God send us a merry new year!

For Christ's circumcision this day we keep,
Who for our sins did often weep;
His hands and feet were wounded deep,
And his blessed side, with a spear.
His head they crowned then with thorn,
And at him they did laugh and scorn,
Who for to save our souls was born;
God send us a happy New Year!

And now with New-Year's gifts each friend
Unto each other they do send;
God grant we may our lives amend,
And that truth may now appear.
Now like the snake cast off your skin
Of evil thoughts and wicked sin,
And to amend this new year begin:
God send us a merry new year!

And now let all the company
In friendly manner all agree,
For we are here welcome all may see
Unto this jolly good cheer.
I thank my master and my dame,
The which are founders of the same,
To eat, to drink now is no shame:
God send us a happy new year!

Come lads and lasses every one,
Jack, Tom, Dick, Bess, Mary and Joan,
Let's cut the meat unto the bone,
For welcome you need not fear.
And here for good liquor you shall not lack,
It will whet my brains and strengthen my back;
This jolly good cheer it must go to wrack:
God send us a happy new year!

Come, give's more liquor when I do call,
I'll drink to each one in this hall,
I hope that so loud I must not bawl,
So unto me lend an ear.
Good fortune to my master send,
And to our dame which is our friend,
Lord bless us all, and so I end:
God send us a happy new year!

There's a very nice, appropriately rowdy version on this album.

Message and fact

Tom Coburn in the WSJ:

The culture that Mr. Obama campaigned against, the old kind of politics, teaches politicians that repetition and "message discipline"—never straying from using the same slogans and talking points—can create reality, regardless of the facts.  Message discipline works if the goal is to win an election or achieve a short-term political goal.  But saying that something is true doesn't make it so.  When a misleading message ultimately clashes with reality, the result is dissonance and conflict.  In a republic, deception is destructive.  Without truth there can be no trust.  Without trust there can be no consent.  And without consent we invite paralysis, if not chaos.

Uh-Huh

Red & blue experiments

This Washington Post article is, for the Post, a fairly nonpartisan look at the competition between red and blue states that are pursuing distinct strategies to solve social, economic, and political problems.  The thesis is that the results of experimentation are getting a little clearer now that so many states have vested control of most or all of the state government in the hands of one party.

Protective Coloration, and its Reverse

Schlock Mercenary creator Howard Tayler writes a good review of 47 Ronin. The movie poster is largely misleading. In fact, it wasn't at all what it appeared to be from trailers and advertising:

I sat down and braced myself for a completely plotless swords-and-sorcery romp with a bit of Asian flair. What I got was a retelling of the story of the Forty-seven Ronin.

I'm happy with that.

I had honestly planned to avoid the film just because of those "extra" elements Hollywood apparently thought it necessary to include. The story of the Forty-seven Ronin is one of the great tales of Japan. It needs, and can be aided by, no ornament beyond what those men did.

The studio didn't think you'd like it, so they pretended it was "a completely plotless sword-and-sorcery romp with a bit of Asian flair." They thought you'd only want to see one of their empty formula pictures, so even when they made a decent film they marketed it as if it were just another of their usual crop. That worked well, I see.

On the other side of this, the marketing for the new Hobbit movie almost convinced me to go and see it in spite of my suspicions. As you will recall, I detest Peter Jackson's treatment of Tolkien so much that I could barely sit through the Fellowship movie, let alone the others. When I learned that he was going to treat the Hobbit, a far shorter work intended for children, as a trilogy of movies... well, let's say I expected this:



But the promotional materials suggested that there was hope for it. I became interested in how they would handle the dragon and Laketown. I almost went to see it...

...until I read this piece. That the studio felt it necessary to include an elvish Xena-Warrior-Princess character in a work of Tolkien's is one thing. What is really unforgivable is that the studio decided to introduce an elvish warrior-princess involved in a love triangle with a dwarf.

I might yet go see 47 Ronin.

A Lecture on Theology

...as delivered by a self-declared "Southern Lady," against "White Trash."

I was suspicious at first, I have to admit: usually people who take up against "white trash" end up painting themselves into a very bad position. However, having considered the argument, I think the lady has something to say.

Wren Day

If you've been around here a while, you know the story about St. Stephen's Day. I won't bore you with it again. It's a grand day for merry-making.



But there's this too:

Merry Christmas

The peace of the Hall to all people of good will. Merry Christmas to you all.

The Star of Bethlehem

If you didn't see it elsewhere, here is an argument from an astronomer that the Star of Bethlehem may have been Jupiter. It's fascinating to me that we have computer programs that can reproduce the sky as it would have been on a night two thousand years ago. In principle, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to calculate the positions of various stars and planets a long time ago, assuming we correctly understand their motions today and nothing occurred that would significantly disturb the regularity of those movements. It would take a pretty major event to change the position of Jupiter, certainly.

What I like about the argument is the idea that no one but the highest-placed stargazers of the the day would have recognized it as significant. It is true that Babylonian civilization had astrologers who were even more accurate than the ancient Greeks, for reasons Tex will appreciate: because the Greeks took their data and tried to make models to explain them, which led to occasional inaccuracies in future predictions, while the Babylonians skipped models and simply figured from empirical data. The idea that this famous star may have been one seen as significant only to those steeped in the arcane traditions of the East is rather plausible.

In any event, it's a charming story for the holiday.

Christmas in Afghanistan

Santa delivers.

Good luck, Marines. May your future Christmases be spent with family as well as friends.

Autonomy and community

That might as well be the title to everything I post, so thoroughly does the conflict preoccupy me.  Anyway, I like Jonah Goldberg's take on two fathers of modern liberalism, Burke and Paine:

The Burkean believes government is there to give all of the institutions of society room to thrive and discover what is good through trial and error.  The Paineian sees progress as a society-wide movement, led by government, with no safe harbors from the Cause.  This is why Paine was one of the earliest advocates of a welfare state — funded by a massive inheritance tax — that would intervene to empower every individual. 

President Obama's second inaugural was a thoroughly Paineian document.  In his telling, America is made up of individuals and a government with nary anything in between.  And because "no single person" can do the things that need to be done, "we must do these things together, as one nation." 

The debate over homosexuality and gay marriage is part of a much larger debate that includes everything from Obamacare — particularly its hostility to religious exemptions — to school vouchers, federalism and the "wars" on women, Christmas, trans fats and inequality. 

The children of Burke form the philosophical core of what was called the "leave me alone coalition," a broad group of institutions and individuals who rightly, and occasionally wrongly, rejected a top-down effort to impose a one-size-fits-all vision of society.  The children of Paine, empowered by their sense of cosmic justice, want all of society's oars to pull as one.  And if you don't pull your oar to the beat of their drum, prepare for their wrath.

Tolerance and relativism

Three good posts, all Maggie's Farm links:

The coherency of E.J. Dionne's piece surprised me:

The answer lies in embracing a humility about how imperfectly human beings understand the divine, which is quite different from rejecting God or faith.  This humility defines the chasm between a living religious tradition and a dead traditionalism.  We need to admit how tempted we are to deify whatever commitments we have at a given moment.  And those of us who are Christian need to acknowledge that over the history of the faith, there have been occasions when “a supposedly changeless truth has changed,” as the great church historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan put it. 

What distinguishes this view from pure relativism is the insistence that truth itself exists.  The Christian’s obligation is to engage in an ongoing quest for a clearer understanding of what it is.  Robertson would disagree with me, but I’d say that we are going through precisely such an effort when it comes to how we think about homosexuality, much as Christians have done before on such matters as slavery, the role of women and the Earth’s place in the universe.

Matt Walsh is one of the many, many people who have run up against the central argument in C.S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man," which also happens to be a central influence in my views:

Believe it or not, even politically incorrect comments about homosexuality have to be excused if we are to believe that baby killing is a moral act. . . . 

I say all of this because my initial intention was to sit down and write about the couple in Washington who just won a 50 million dollar “wrongful birth” settlement.  Brock and Rhea Wuth sued a hospital because their son was born severely disabled. No, they were not alleging that the hospital caused the disability; they alleged that the hospital (and a lab testing facility) did not run the correct tests that would have detected the genetic defects while the child was still in the womb.  Had they been given the correct tests, they would have known that the baby was “defective,” and then killed it.  Tragically, they were robbed of the opportunity to abort their son, so the hospital must pay for the son’s care — for the rest of his life. 

Oh, but don’t judge them:  they still “love” their child.  They wish he was dead, they wish they had killed him, but they still “love” him.  Make no judgments.  Offer no stern words.  They sued a hospital for not giving them the chance to kill their child, but do not think yourself qualified to condemn such a thing.

And finally, Mark Steyn on making everything mandatory that is not prohibited:

Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.” 

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise.  Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste.  The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Good advice

I could use all of these tips.

Happiness and Slavery

A Think Progress story on the Robertson drama says:

Conservatives have fervently been defending Robertson’s comments about homosexuality, though they have been noticeably silent about his comments on race and civil rights.

OK, I thought that was curious, so I looked up what he said. Here are those remarks.

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson is quoted in GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The article goes on to describe the political subjugation of blacks in the American South at that period of time, which was certainly real. The clear suggestion is that his inability to imagine how unhappy they must have been is clear proof of racism, in spite of his sense of being "white trash" sharing a very similar experience at least on a class level. Indeed, you might even think his class sympathies exacerbate his racial insensitivity: how could he think his experience was in any way like theirs?

I gather from a quick skimming of left-leaning articles on the subject that this is the common opinion. However, I am moved to wonder if it is the right way to think about it. He talks about people being "godly," and it is true that religion and stable families -- both of which were more prevalent in the era -- are often found by studies to be linked with happiness. But that's not really what moves me to wonder. What moves me to wonder is a historical controversy over the slave narratives.

In the Great Depression, the WPA recorded thousands of interviews with then-older Americans who had themselves been slaves before the Civil War. The collection is rightly described as a "peerless" resource, but historians have expressed some suspicion of the views expressed by the slaves in the interviews. The only one that made it into the Wikipedia article is expressed as a concern that having "all white interviewers" may have slanted the depiction of plantation life, making it "too positive." And indeed it is often quite positive as a description of what life was like as a slave.

There are some other theories about why the former slaves had such positive things to say about their lives on the plantation. The one to which I am most inclined is that they were all much older when they gave the interviews, and spoke with the natural nostalgia of the old for the sunny days of youth. Memory paints the memories of those days, in nearly all of us, with rose colors.

But there are other possibilities too. For one thing, economic conditions in the South cratered after the war, so that life after the war was markedly harder for everyone -- especially, as is usual, those on the bottom. The traditional market for Southern cotton was lost, as the English mills had turned to India during the war's blockade. The South's mills were destroyed, so it was relegated to being a producer of raw materials for Northern mills at rates set by Northern banks. The economic system imposed by the North was a brutal colonial-style monoculture built around cotton production, and colonial monocultures are notoriously harsh places to live (here as in Latin America, India, and elsewhere). Until the boll weevil collapsed the cotton economy in the late 1920s, the South was ground down by the usual effects of such economies: the price of the monocultural good (cotton, here) dropped every year, because supply increased every year as those commanding the economy forced ever-greater production of the single cash crop. Under those circumstances, quality of life dropped, again especially for the poorest and those most dependent on agriculture. Naturally those who had been slaves who had only known how to work cotton farms, or who were directly descended of slaves who had, were very likely to be a part of the very lowest agricultural classes tied to the cotton monoculture. They would have endured the worst conditions imposed by the economic system.

So it is possible (indeed it doesn't seem unlikely) that happiness is greatly influenced by economic realities. When the interviews were conducted from 1936-8, the boll weevil had collapsed the cotton economy, and the Great Depression had followed on its heels. While the boll weevil eventually allowed the South to escape the monoculture economy, at first it meant a severe economic depression for the region, which was then followed on by a severe depression worldwide. The former slave speaking in 1937 would be looking back on a life that had, in economic terms, ground ever worse each year of his or her life, capped by ten years' complete economic failure. The pre-war plantations may really have seemed like a better place by comparison to that. They may really have been, if not a better place, a happier place.

I see that Robertson was born in 1946. That means he grew up during the great economic boom that followed the end of World War II. Conditions that had long been terrible would have been improving for as long as his generation could remember, so that they would have grown up among stories of how bad things had been and how much better they were now. Jim Crow, though evil, was at that time a constant: perhaps even lessened in force by the economic success, so that poor whites and poor blacks were not in such cutthroat competition for very limited economic opportunities.

So were people happy? I wasn't there; I don't know. I'm not prepared to say that they weren't, though, because the problem may be our assumption that they couldn't have been. It may be that the slave narratives are really biased by the effect of having white interviewers, in other words; it may be that a very similar effect was causing young Robertson not to see or notice the pain of his black compatriots. I don't dismiss the proposition; but I think we ought to consider carefully whether it isn't possible that economic effects may have been overwhelming for those so close to grinding poverty. It happens to explain both controversies in a way that is consistent with the statements in interviews of the historical figures who were actually there.

Blast Those Christian Radicals

They're clearly behind this atrocity.

MAD About Speech

Everyone understands that the First Amendment restrains only government actions, not social pressures being brought to bear. There is an allied question, however, about those social pressures. The First Amendment uses government itself to restrain government from interfering with free expression. The People, insofar as they are properly thought of as acting through the state, are therefore using an aspect of their common will to restrain itself.

Why shouldn't social pressures be brought to bear against social pressures in the same way? If a group attempts to use social pressure to get someone fired for saying things they find objectionable, shouldn't those people themselves be pursued (and their employers subject to demands that they be fired at once)?

That sounds like a pretty unpleasant place to live. Those calling for civility are doubtless thinking of that. I wonder if the proper analogy, though, isn't to nuclear war. Mutually-Assured Destruction proved an effective restraint, just because a post-war world would have been such an unpleasant place to live.

In the current moment we see not only organizations but ad-hoc movements engaged in a sort of blood-lust, in love with the unrestrained power to destroy. There is no legal recourse against them, because the government only properly restrains the government. It is society that must restrain society.

I yield to none in my respect for courtesy. Certainly I have no desire to live in the kind of world in which our every expression is carefully watched by our ideological enemies in the hope that some public expression of religion, some joke, some interview should produce an opportunity to destroy our lives.

There are only two roads to avoid that world, though, and the first road is to avoid all public expressions of religion, all jokes, or the giving of interviews. The other is to make clear that this is a two-way street, if they insist upon it. Hopefully the cataclysm can be avoided, but clearly it will not be avoided out of the plain goodness of peoples' hearts.

Doctor knows best

Something tells me we're going to be seeing more of this.

That time of year

Time for the "best of the year" lists.  Here are the 30 best quotations from 2013.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The BBC piece is not always good history -- there are a few real howlers in the commentary -- but I suppose that's part of the charm of television.

Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledez of þe best,
Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer,
With rych reuel oryȝt and rechles merþes.
Þer tournayed tulkes by tymez ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé þise gentyle kniȝtes,
Syþen kayred to þe court caroles to make.

With Old and especially Middle English, you can often work out the meaning approximately by sounding out the word, remembering that "Þ" or "þ" is a "Th-" sound. The poem will sound archaic, but only a few words have passed completely out of the language. One of these is "tulkes," which is translated as "fighting man" or "soldier." Tolkien gives "tulkes" as "knights," but then translated "kniȝtes" as "lords," probably simply so as not to repeat himself. Tolkien appears to me to have adapted "tulkes" for the name of his Valar of might and prowess, Tulkas the Valiant, who laughed in war so that Melkor fled before him.

Read more about "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" as a Christmas poem, if you like.

Running Late

Last Sunday was Gaudete Sunday.  This is the last hour in which I can thus post this before it's overtaken by events. :)



Getting close now.

UPDATE:

"Our bread it is white, and our ale it is brown."

On Cursing

A new book treats the question of obscene words, noting that just what qualifies as an obscenity has changed a lot over the years.  The Medievals weren't shocked by references to bodily functions, including sex, because of the relative lack of privacy at the time; they were shocked by blasphemy, which is why those who wanted to speak an obscenity made some reference to something holy.  The Victorians, who had privacy, made a big deal about words that related to sex or scatology.  

We're no different, she proves:

The real swear words of our time, she notes, are race- and gender-based epithets, which polite society has banned—words that, indeed, almost define polite society by their absence.‘MOTHER, WILFRED WROTE A BAD WORD!’
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

And sure enough, the reviewers (especially the British ones) have gleefully put into print all the once-prohibited words they know for fornication and excrement. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, gerunds, even adverbs—all-purpose bits of grammar that seem intended mostly to prove, among the writing classes, that their users want us to admire them for having broken free from the stultifying strictures of the linguistic past. Then, when they reach Mohr’s discussion of racial and sex-preference terms, they suddenly turn into prissy Victorian matrons, clicking their tongues in disapproval. A little euphemism, a lot of typographical gesturing, some elaborate circumlocution—it takes work to review a book about these modern unspeakables and not actually quote them. 

UPDATE:

Mark Steyn:

 Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill: 

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

Once Again, With Feeling

You are all (excepting one of you, our friend the orchestral musician) doubtless bored with my repeated commentary on the unity of beautiful music. I won't expound on it this time. I'll just give you a few videos to watch. You'll be glad you did.

Having Lots of Female Friends

Via this article on GWB, I learned that something called "Thought Cloud" exists.

Via Thought Cloud, I learned that it's problematic for a man to have too many female friends.

Is this right? When I was a boy, my elementary school did something that was at the time actually illegal: it took our standardized test scores on reading and used them to sort us into levels. We had an "advanced" class, a "medium" class, and a slow class (which wasn't given a name). Now girls mature faster than boys, especially in terms of academic work, so as a consequence I spent my formative years in a class with 26 girls and 4 boys, of whom I was one. Since we were sorted alphabetically, I was perforce surrounded by girls all the time except at recess.

From my perspective this has always meant that I learned early how to like and talk to girls, which has been a tremendous benefit. It turns out (boys, I am talking to you here) that girls are interesting, and have markedly different perspectives on life. If you're curious about big-T Truth, it's good to hear what other people with different perspectives have to say. If you're not interested in big-T Truth, you should rethink your life. As Aristotle rightly suggests, the contemplative life is one of the best ones available for our limited time here on Earth.

I think the author is worried about sexuality, which is a fair point. But learning to live with temptation is practicing the virtue of temperance, which is (as Aquinas will tell you) finally at the heart of every virtue. It's a matter of practice ("A virtue is a permanent habit," Aquinas says in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics; and habits are formed by practice).

So of course you should have friends who are girls (or, later, women), if you are a boy or a man; and vice-versa. It is wisdom to do so.

Frozen

For this reason alone, it must be repealed.

"Wounded"

OK, Now I've Heard Of Him

I remember Tex posted once about "Phil" Robertson, and without reading very closely I assumed she must be talking about "Pat" Robertson. It appears the two gentlemen share some views.

This is a very ordinary, traditional Christian view with pretty strong Biblical support. It's also a view that has a lot of philosophical support, and not just from Christian or religious philosophers: Kant takes exactly the same view in the Metaphysics of Morals, 6:277-8, all the way down to asserting that the issue is one of a violation of logic (or basic rationality).

Sexual union (commercium sexuale) is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.... This is either a natural use (by which procreation of the same kind is possible) or an unnatural use, and unnatural use takes place with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species. Since such transgression of laws, called unnatural (crimina carnis contra naturam) or also unmentionable vices, do wrong to humanity in our own person, there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save them from being repudiated completely.

In the next paragraph, Kant goes on to define marriage as "the union of two persons of different sexes."

You're not obligated to be a Kantian, and I'm not one; you're not obligated to be a Christian either. But it's extraordinary to treat this as if it were a mere expression of hate. Kant, for example, has an argument for what it means to 'respect the humanity in one's own person' that applies here as elsewhere.

Kant is too important to the Left for him to be disappeared. I won't be surprised, though, if it becomes increasingly hard to find copies of his book that don't redact those paragraphs.

Nice

Resuming the War

Apparently Carlisle has succumbed to the general madness.

The U.S. Army War College, which molds future field generals, has begun discussing whether it should remove its portraits of Confederate generals — including those of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson....

It is the kind of historical cleansing that could spark an Army-wide debate: Lee’s portrait adorns the walls of other military installations and government buildings. Two portraits of Lee are on display at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.: In the Cadet Mess Hall is a painting of Lee when he was superintendent as an Army captain. A portrait of Lee in full Confederate regalia hangs on the second floor of Jefferson Hall, the campus library.

There's a good reason you shouldn't, which the article happens upon by accident:

In 1975, Congress enacted a joint resolution reinstating Lee’s U.S. citizenship in what could be considered a final act to heal Civil War wounds. The resolution praised Lee’s character and his work to reunify the nation.

It's a bad idea to undo "last acts of healing." But you do what you want to do.

Singing of Hard Times

Johnny Cash sang this one to an international hit.



Henry Rollins wonders about doing the same thing now.



Yeah, OK. So what does it mean to ride against the order we know?

War, does it not?

Iowahawk on Propaganda

He is mocking the current propaganda, but his early example is striking.

This one is the one I always think of. It's weaker than his example, though: it stops at the horror, and misses the quality of the angelic that follows.

It's a silly place

Ace of Spades can't decide if the post he found about the tragedy of antifeminist computer coding is fake or not.  The obvious answer is that it's both fake and not-fake, and there's no necessary contradiction, unless you're stuck in an andronormative phallo-logical space.

Ace's commenters have fun with appropriate 404 error messages for feminist coding.

Seeing voices

Sign language fascinates me.  In my elementary school, we all learned to signed letters when we read about Helen Keller, and I can do it to this day.  It was with some dismay that I learned as an adult how much more complex true sign language is and how difficult its fluent and expressive practice.  Of course, it's easier just to fake it.  I know you've all seen the stories already about President Obama's fake interpreter at the Mandela funeral, but you may not have seen this video.

Mark Steyn reflects on the security implications:

[H]ow heartening, as one watches the viral video of Obama droning on while a mere foot and a half away Mr. Jantjie rubs his belly and tickles his ear, to think that the White House’s usual money-no-object security operation went to the trouble of flying in Air Force One, plus the “decoy” Air Force One, plus support aircraft, plus the 120-vehicle motorcade or whatever it’s up to by now, plus a bazillion Secret Service agents with reflector shades and telephone wire dangling from their ears, to shepherd POTUS into the secured venue and then stand him onstage next to an $85-a-day violent schizophrenic.  In the movie version—In the Sign of Fire—grizzled maverick Clint Eastwood will be the only guy to figure it out at the last minute and hurl himself at John Malkovich, as they roll into the orchestra pit with Malkovich furiously signing “Ow!” and “Eek!”  But in real life I expect they’ll just double the motorcade to 240 vehicles and order up even more expensive reflector shades.

No doubt Thamsanqa Jantjie was channeling Rowan Atkinson.  My favorite bit is the "$15 million" towards the middle.

Way harsh

A lot of the North Korean press release about the chief nutso's purged uncle didn't come through very well in translation, but this part is clear enough:

[D]espicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.

Few things fascinate me more than how one crazy guy can dominate a society:  the uneasy web of influence and privilege that keeps his henchmen in power over the populace, and the balancing act that keeps his henchmen from carving him up and serving him for dinner.  The old guard can't much enjoy seeing the kid start picking off members of their own ranks.  They probably have networks he can scarcely imagine, made up of people who must live in a perpetual state of crazed desperation.

Lessons from the food industry

I've never worked in a kitchen, but I've been a waitress in more than one establishment, so I can relate to some of this article about 23 important life lessons from the restaurant world. This one, about how to respond to a particular kind of ugliness, has a much broader application than the food industry: "You just have to get over it and remind yourself never to be like that in your own life." It's similar to advice I received many years ago about slander: "Live so that no one will believe it of you." There's also no disputing the high value of being close to a good chef who's always cooking new things he wants people to try out.

Hardball

Georgia has now joined South Carolina's first steps toward state nullification of Obamacare.  The four-step process, developed by the Tenth Amendment Center, includes awarding citizens state tax credits to offset any federal penalties, and revoking the state licenses of insurers that participate.

South of the Border

Won't it be amazing if the U.S.-Mexico border stops demarcating a division between an northern economy that functions and a southern one that does not?

On Thursday, Mexico's Congress passed what could be the most transformative economic legislation there in a century.  The members had a few fist fights and some screamed "treason," but the lower House still voted to expose the state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, to the free market.  And at 354-134, the vote wasn't close.

It brings to mind the scene in that silly global-warming-causes-catastrophic-freeze movie in which millions of Americans try to pour over the border into Mexico.

A different death spiral

This Forbes article is a helpful explanation of the complicated choices facing insurance companies as their customers embark on a completely different scheme of self-selection from the one that has driven actuarial planning up to now.  It seems that the ACA tried to guard against some kinds of self-selection and their resulting death-spiral dangers by requiring insurance companies to create one risk pool for all of their customers, regardless of whether they purchased their insurance on or off the exchange.  The law's architects did not take fully into account, however, how many insurers might decide to boycott the exchange altogether.  Boycotting insurers are free to price their products on the basis of their own pools.  If I understand the author's argument, this is likely for several reasons to result in a divergence of the risk profiles that will favor the competitive position of the non-exchange insurers even on their ACA-compliant products.

Pricing is only one aspect that may vary sharply between exchange and non-exchange products:  there is already considerable pressure on exchange products to shrink their provider networks and covered drug lists.  I've become interested in Assurant Health, an insurer that decided to boycott the exchanges.  Its prices for a Bronze plan are slightly higher than those of Blue Cross, but its network is the old-fashioned universal sort.  The article cites to a detailed brief on risk pools, including this explanation of why network shrinkage may be a more powerful cost-control issue than I realized:

Prohibiting [denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions] leaves insurers vulnerable to attracting a disproportionate share of patients with poor health risks. This vulnerability might cause them to leave the market or encourage them to use more covert or indirect means of risk avoidance, such as selective marketing or structuring their provider networks to exclude the doctors or hospitals preferred by higher risk patients.

It's not just that excellent hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or cancer centers charge high rates.  It's that they attract exactly the sort of patient that an insurer needs to avoid if it can't tie its prices to the health status of brand-new customers.

"I can't believe they let you do that"

Bill Whittle is terrific.  I can't seem to link directly to this video, so here's a basic PJTV link that, for now at least, takes you directly to his piece describing the pleasures of visiting Texas for Thanksgiving.

How many uninsured Americans are there, really?

Megan McArdle tries to get a handle on just how many people really were uninsured.  Is it more or less than the number of people who were insured before the PPACA hit them like a truck?

A third possibility is that we don’t have the uninsured problem we thought we had.  Most of the estimates we have for the uninsured population are really pretty crude.  For one thing, we tend to treat the U.S.'s roughly 48 million uninsured as if they were part of a discrete group, like Mormons or people who know how to play the tuba.  But in fact, people change insurance status all the time.  If you look at data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, you’ll see that a lot of people are uninsured for at least a month, but if you look at who is uninsured for as long as two years, that number falls by two-thirds.  If you extend the reference period out to four years, just 7.6 percent of the population counts as “uninsured.”  That is not a negligible number, but it is less than half of the 48 million we think of as uninsured.  And it’s heavily skewed toward immigrants and the young. . . .

. . . and to all a good flight

Medieval Warfare, Lego-Style

No female Legos were harmed in the making of this documentary. At least, I assume not, since I didn't see any that were pink.

The one-way compromise ratchet

John Hinderaker at PowerLine wonders why budget "compromise" always results in higher spending.  The best conservatives ever seem to be able to get is decreases in the rate of increased spending.

A number of observers are praising today’s deal as a “compromise.”   Patty Murray set the tone: “‘Compromise has been a dirty word” in Washington, D.C., Murray complained in an evening news conference, but “we have broken through the partisanship and the gridlock.”  But wait! The 2011 Budget Control Act was itself a compromise.  The $967 billion discretionary spending limit was a compromise, just two years ago.  So why should a higher spending number now be lauded as a “compromise”?  How about if we reduce spending by another $50 billion, to $917 billion?  That would be a compromise too, wouldn’t it?  But somehow that isn’t the sort of compromise that is ever entertained in Washington.

Hinderaker also points out the soft underbelly of this and every other budget "deal"--the gambit Republicans fall for every single time:

Republicans did get something in exchange for increasing spending: notably, federal employees will have to increase their pension contributions.  But we can say goodbye to the $2.1 trillion in spending cuts that the GOP trumpeted following the 2011 Budget Control Act.  That is the real moral of the story–long-term budget agreements are meaningless.  Typically, minuscule spending cuts up front are augmented by major cuts in the out-years.  But the reality is that the out-years never come.  No Congress can bind a future Congress, and political will to reduce spending is always in short supply.  Consequently, any spending deal is meaningless, except insofar as it applies to the current year or next year’s spending.  Beyond that, all claims to have cut government spending are fatuous.

Wouldn't it be amazing to see a bipartisan compromise that imposed immediate spending cuts (not merely decelerations) in exchange for unspecified entitlement increases to be implemented in 2024?

Meritocracy

Those of us who are well into our curmudgeon years probably have to stop and laugh now and then at our growing tendency to deplore the errors of this new crop of whippersnappers.  It is a pleasure, therefore, occasionally to find evidence that a characteristic error of the age is falling out of favor with the Young Turks:

More than 70 percent of [unionized] teachers on the job less than a decade are interested in changing the traditional salary scale, which rewards educators for longevity rather than performance.  Just 41 percent of more veteran teachers back such reforms, according to a national survey last year by the organization Teach Plus.  The poll documented similar gulfs in opinion about revamping teacher evaluations and pensions.

Unions are under intense pressure from falling membership, in the wake of movements to make their dues-paying membership voluntary.  They're finding that they have to consider what their members think.

My hometown

This five-minute clip from "Good Morning, America" is a brief introduction to the small town we live near.  The accents are interesting.  Several speakers are local, but the mayor obviously is a winter Texan who stayed on.  This time of year the parking lots are full of license plates from Wisconsin and Michigan.

An Outlaw Interlude

Some of you doubtless know the Dallas Moore Band, which has been billed as everything from an heir of Outlaw Country to the torch-bearer for Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern Rock.

Whether or not you know the band, though, here's an anthem that you may find useful at times in the next few years.

Steampunk insect act

I like these.

The Pig Bang

From Rocket Science, a report on a pig farm manure pit explosion that killed 1,500 pigs and seriously injured a human worker.  The unusual explosion may or may not have something to do with experimental pig feed or antibiotics.  Kind of makes you wonder what's going on in your gut.  Or maybe it just makes me wonder that, given my curious obsession with the topic.  I have to go give a short talk to some teenagers about organic gardening, so I'm focused more than usual on poop, the cycle of life, and the storage and release of chemical energy.

Most transparent presidential psyche ever

Ace has up a good essay about the press's Hitchcockian treatment of Barack Obama.  Hitchcock's thrillers employed a device he called the MacGuffin: "The thing that the hero has to get, but the audience doesn't care what it is."  He was a skilled enough storyteller not to waste any superfluous exposition on where the MacGuffin came from, how it worked, or what it might do it if got loose.  The audience just wanted to watch the hero be disappointed, hurt, and ultimately successful.  In Nick Lowe's formulation, the MacGuffin is one of the plot coupons the hero has to save up so he can send off to the Author for an ending.

The other day I was participating in an argument that went off in a familiar direction:  my interlocutor demanded to know with what I would offer to replace the splendor that is the PPACA if it were repealed.  My response, as usual, was that there are a number of practical proposals anyone can look up if (as seems unlikely) he's genuinely interested, such as high deductibles combined with HSA's and tax breaks or outright subsidies.  But the immediate point is that the law is proving so obviously and concretely harmful that simple repeal would constitute an improvement without any regard to a replacement.  His entire response was, "Oh, I see. So it's 'Screw you, Obama.'"  Yes, I don't care about health insurance.  I'm just the Villain who places obstacles between the Hero and his MacGuffin.

For too many of Obama's followers, the story is about him, not about his policy or his countrymen.  They think they're in a "Raiders of the Lost MacGuffin" caper, but it's really a science fiction disaster movie in the "You're Meddling with Forces You Don't Understand" line.

Ace carries his theme further with a report on the breathless interest in Obama's reading list and what it reveals about the state of his internal journey.

Tullamore Dew

There are many blessings that come with dismissing television from your life; there are few sorrows. But I expect all of you have seen this before me.



It's a fine piece, especially if you have wasted so much of your life in pubs that you can't help but join in the final verse.

Just-in-time insurance

I've been assuming for months now that the problem with waiting until you get sick to buy the new guaranteed-issue health insurance was that you can sign up only once a year, which leaves you exposed to up to a year's worth of medical expenses before your new coverage kicks in.

I'm hearing now that that's true only if you plan to go through the exchange to buy your coverage, which is necessary only if you want to try to qualify for a premium subsidy.  To my utter amazement, it appears that you really will be able to go to an insurance company at any time and buy coverage, regardless of pre-existing conditions.  The only counterargument I'm finding on any official websites is "We'd really rather you didn't do that."  There's the penalty, of course, but anyone should be able to avoid a penalty simply by not overpaying taxes and putting himself in the position of needing to apply for a tax refund.

Who wrote this thing?  Were they high?  I know it's possible to rack up a big ICU bill in a few weeks, but come on.  What's easier, saving up against that one-time danger, or paying $10K a year in premiums year in and year out?

This is like guaranteed-issue fire insurance you can buy after you dial 911 and while you're waiting for the fire trucks to arrive.  If this is right the law has got to collapse under its own weight.

Shards of Narsil

Bill Whittle is meditating on the Lord of the Rings.

On Vaccines

I assume that most of you are not both (a) of an age to have young children, and (b) struggling with whether or not to vaccinate them. For any of you who are, however, my cousin in medicine writes to recommend this article. She is a young mother herself.

How To Fit In As A Marine Infantrywoman

The satirical Duffleblog is in rare form today.

After finishing check-in late Friday to Alpha Co, 1st Battalion 6th Marines wearing her dress blue uniform, Private First Class Rhonda “Thunderbeast” Williams went down to Honest Pierre’s Used Car Emporium and bought a hot pink Ford Mustang at 46 percent interest....

The final acceptance by the company came on Saturday night, when the entire unit went out in town. After consuming several dozen alcoholic beverages and getting a tattoo of ‘Death Before Dishonor’ on her entire back, Williams led her platoon into the Pink Flamingo, a local gentlemen’s club near the base. At the end of the evening she was seen leaving with a male waiter who she had been loudly hitting on all night.

On Monday, Williams had informed her chain of command she was getting married.

Heh.

The self-pay patient

This is an incredibly useful article about strategies for dealing with Obamacare without exposing your household to financial ruin.  I look forward to reading the guy's book when it comes out.  There is information about price transparency, cash discounts, exempt healthcare cost-sharing ministries (including for non-evangelicals), exceptions to tax penalties, affordable telemedicine for simple illnesses, and exempt short-term or limited-scope insurance policies.  This is exactly the sort of information I've been looking for from licensed health insurance brokers, two of whom have proved to know very little about the subject.

"Special Government Benefits"

Evil Hobby Lobby! Don't they realize how much they owe the government?

This corporation, which already takes advantage of special government benefits by incorporating as a private business in the first place (entitling Hobby Lobby to tax benefits and liability shelters to which individuals alone are not entitled), wants to use its government-created corporate status with the help of government-run courts not just to express its religion on a poster or what have you but to force its employees to comply with the supposed religion of the corporation’s founders. This is, plain and simple, a corporation trying to contort government to impose the religious views of some onto many. This is precisely what our nation was founded against.

I think the writer and I agree on the issue at stake, but disagree about the Constitutional principle entirely. The issue at stake is whether religious people can form corporations, or whether your ability to practice your religion must serve as a kind of severe economic penalty. If you can't form corporations to pursue economic activities, you are subject not to limited liability but to losing everything you own in the event that your business fails. What the author is calling "special government benefits" are, rather, an international feature of the corporate mode of organization that has made it so powerful in driving economic growth.

What the government wants to do here is to bar religious organizations from corporate status, so that religious people must either abandon their moral principles when they enter the market, or accept an uneven risk of personal financial destruction v. those without moral principles.

As for compelling employees to abide by its corporate religious principles, of course, Hobby Lobby makes no such claim. It doesn't claim any right, nor express any wish, to prevent employees from purchasing birth control. Its owners merely state that they are unwilling to buy and distribute birth control themselves, especially the kind that facilitates abortion.

Should they have to do so? Or exit the market? Or, at least, accept a disproportionate risk of personal financial destruction if they wish to run a business?

A Thoughtful Analysis of the Pope's Recent Writings

Via D29, "In the Spirit of John Chrysostom." The writer is a fan; but see what you think.

A different definition of success

Not so much the Amazon variety, but the sort we can expect for the government:

The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth.  It is to keep the program alive until 2015.  The administration's priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance.  It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all.  And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority.

Isaac Newton and the apple

The apple didn't hit Newton on the head and inspire him with the sudden insight that there's such a thing as gravity.  People had been noodling over the obvious tendency of things to fall just about forever.  For a long time, their views on the subject took the form of theories about how objects might be animated, such as by an innate desire to be reunited with the Earth.  During the Enlightenment, as creatures now known as "scientists" began to emerge, the focus left the supposed interior experience of the objects and trained itself on finding universal, predictable patterns in the movement.

So what was really going through Newton's mind when the apple fell from the tree?  Before Newton was well launched on his extraordinary career, natural philosophers already had adopted the "inertia" model of movement; that is to say, objects tend to keep moving in a straight line unless slowed or diverted by an outside force.  But this was puzzling in view of the evident circular/elliptical movement of heavenly bodies.  There was a strong tendency to find circles "perfect" and "beautiful," resulting in a popular view that lowly straight-line movements characterized earthly bodies while heavenly bodies moved in stately and superior circles.  Were there separate laws of motion on Earth and in Heaven?

Newton's brilliance lay in a unifying theme that would explain why an apple appears to fall straight down while the Moon describes a circular orbit around the Earth.

We have now finally arrived at that idyllic summer afternoon in Grantham in 1666, as the young Isaac Newton, home from university to avoid the plague, whilst lying in his mother’s garden contemplating the universe, as one does, chanced to see an apple falling from a tree.  Newton didn’t ask why it fell, but set off on a much more interesting, complicated and fruitful line of speculation.  Newton’s line of thought went something like this.  If Descartes is right with his theory of inertia, . . . then there must be some force pulling the moon down towards the earth and preventing it shooting off in a straight line at a tangent to its orbit.  What if, he thought, the force that holds the moon in its orbit and the force that cause the apple to fall to the ground were one and the same?  This frighteningly simple thought is the germ out of which Newton’s theory of universal gravity and his masterpiece the Principia grew.

Newton guessed that, if the Moon were motionless, it would fall straight down to Earth the same as the apple.  But the Moon has a momentum that's at right angles to the gravity vector, which always points to the center of the Earth, meaning that the Moon's path is gradually changing in direction as the it "falls" sideways around the Earth.  The same gravitational force could account for the curved motion of the Moon and the straight motion of the apple.

The Principia was published in 1687, after Newton put considerable additional work into his first intuition about gravity, including the critical insight that elliptical planetary orbits result from a force pointing from each planet straight down into the Sun, which is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two.  Not that Newton dreamed up either the planets' elliptical orbits or the inverse-square law on his own.  Galileo had noticed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that gravity acts as a constant acceleration on falling bodies, no matter what their weights. Kepler published his three laws of planetary motion in the first couple of decades of the 17th century, showing that planets move in ellipses of which the Sun is one focus. Between Newton's 1666 "apple moment" and the 1687 publication of the Principia, Hooke and others were inching their way toward the inverse-square law, first realizing that gravity always operated in one direction (earlier theories included the idea that gravity pushed at one point in the orbit and pulled at another), then establishing that its attractive power varied with distance, and finally nailing down the understanding that gravity alters with the square of the distance between the attractive bodies.  Newton's genius was to understand that the inverse-square law, plus the tendency of objects to move in a straight line unless acting on by a force, simultaneously explained the elliptical paths of planets in Heaven and the straight downward fall of an apple from a tree on Earth.

As Richard Feynman used to say, in the old world people believed that angels flew behind planets and pushed them in their circular paths.  Now, in the advanced modern world, we say that the angels are invisible and they push at right angles to what we thought back then.   We still have no idea what gravity is, but we're considerably more adept as describing what kinds of motions it produces, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Eye contact

Making it personal is a good way to harness people's will to work.  With strangers, we trade.  With fellow human beings, we give.  A handful of Rice engineering students took on a freshman-year project to make a robotic arm for a wheelchair bound teenager with brittle-bone disease.  They found some of the engineering problems unexpectedly tough to crack:

And there was an even bigger problem.  The arm wasn't nearly finished, but the engineering course was ending.  But the team members say the idea of not finishing the project never entered their minds. 

"We had someone who came and sat down in front of us, and asked for our help," says Najoomi.

It took them till the end of their sophomore year, but they finally presented a working gadget to their client.

H/t:  for this and other posts to come this morning, "Not Exactly Rocket Science."

The real "Amazon experience"

I don't think the President and his henchmen really want the true Amazon experience as much as they think they do.

Mr. Stone describes a meeting during the 2000 holiday season when Mr. Bezos tested a claim by Bill Price, his vice president for customer services, who said hold times on Amazon's phone lines were less than a minute. 

"'Really?' Bezos said.  'Let's see.'  On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon's 800 number. . . .  Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time.  A brutal minute passed, then two. . . .  Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable."  Less than a year later, Mr. Price was gone from Amazon.

 Whatever we may think about Amazon's goals, there's no denying that Bezos is fanatically devoted to testing the truth of claims about the progress toward those goals.  It's not an "Emperor's New Clothes" atmosphere over there.

Technophilia

Jeff Bezos is everything I love about modernism and free enterprise.  I don't think the delivery drones are going to make it out to my house in 30 minutes, though.  We can't even get pizza delivered here.

In honor of the brave new world we're going to pull down our house and construct this in its place:

"Based on my poor understanding of history, science, and ethics..."

My favorite part about this anti-politician petition on WhiteHouse.gov is that it is apparently being driven by the Left. I heard about it from one of my Left-leaning friends, and the support I can find for it is all built around left-leaning organizations. The by-name exemption of Ph.D.s is suspicious as well -- education is a beautiful thing, but a doctorate is not a substitute for understanding. Hopefully they go together, but manifestly not necessarily.