Meanwhile, on the marijuana front, the people of states like Colorado are engaging in an odd, 21st century variety of nullification. Unlike the 19th century John Calhoun version, state laws legalizing marijuana don't purport to neutralize the still-extant federal laws banning cannabis. But the state, and millions of Coloradans, are simply ignoring the federal law and, in essence, daring the feds to do something about it.
State laws, of course, can't neutralize federal law, as the Constitution's Supremacy Clause makes clear. But, bloated as it is, the federal law enforcement apparatus isn't up to the task of prosecuting all the marijuana users in Colorado. And if it tried, it would have to bring them to trial before juries in Colorado, who would probably acquit most of them. There would also be massive political backlash, amplified in the coming 2014 and 2016 elections because Colorado is a swing state. And in response to Colorado's example, other states look likely to follow suit, making the feds' problem much bigger.
So, despite all the federal laws on the books, Colorado has de facto nullified them, and started a process that may very well snowball, all without directly attacking the federal laws, or the federal government, at all.
Nullification
Rand Paul On Women
Dr. Althouse is worried that Republicans still can't talk about women. Really, she'd rather they didn't, but thinks Democrats won't let them stop:
And in truth, the Right as a movement had let it go before Obamacare. Whatever your personal feelings about contraception, they were personal feelings, and we were going to accept that people could make choices in private. Whatever else may be said about the decision to require free birth control in Obamacare-compliant insurance, it's been a huge political win for the Left because it's forced the issue of contraception back into the public space. "Free" just means that everyone else has to pay for it, which means that it's everyone else's business.
Dr. Althouse seems to be out at sea here:
No, the Clinton legacy hasn't been fully appreciated. Not at all.
Gregory tries to drag Paul back to the question — whether the GOP should be talking about "women's health, women's bodies." And Paul goes through the same tactics: cooling things off with a joke ("I try never to have discussions of anatomy unless I'm at a medical conference"), saying that the whole subject is "dumbed down" and political, and observing that way women are doing well. He adds another compliment, that the women he knows are "conquering the world," not complaining about how "terrible" and "misogynist" it is. He never says one thing about birth control, women's bodies, or the unfortunate locutions of other members of his party.Of course, Paul's a libertarian, and so he's one of those on the Right most inclined to let the whole business go.
So that's how Paul is going to deal with the media efforts to lure Republicans into playing the Democrats' war on women game.
And in truth, the Right as a movement had let it go before Obamacare. Whatever your personal feelings about contraception, they were personal feelings, and we were going to accept that people could make choices in private. Whatever else may be said about the decision to require free birth control in Obamacare-compliant insurance, it's been a huge political win for the Left because it's forced the issue of contraception back into the public space. "Free" just means that everyone else has to pay for it, which means that it's everyone else's business.
Dr. Althouse seems to be out at sea here:
If young women are "conquering the world" (as Paul said), why not credit Monica Lewinsky with her conquest of the world's most powerful man? She was enthusiastic and willing, from what I read. I think the sexual harassment problem in the case of Bill Clinton has to do with other women who were pressured to have sex and with the women and men who were not in a position to improve their standing in the workplace by interacting sexually with the boss.The relevant moral issue here is not that men in the White House were denied the opportunity to advance themselves by pleasuring the boss. That won't even come up as an issue if you hold the line on the real moral issue, which is... are we really so lost that we have to explain what it is? That we have to explain why this isn't something to celebrate? The oathbreaking, the use of power to seduce and corrupt, the lies under oath, the adultery, all of it?
No, the Clinton legacy hasn't been fully appreciated. Not at all.
Saturday Afternoon AMV
Another one of Hayao Miyazaki's modern fairy tales. Both different and familiar.
Seeking Advice on Outdoor Gear, Horsemanship, Knives, Etc.
My projects for 2014 will include doing more hunting and camping, becoming a much better horseman, and getting back into martial arts, and I need some advice from my good companions here. I have been out of all of these activities for quite a few years now, and I was never especially good at any of them, so any advice would be appreciated.
As for hunting, does anyone have advice for hunting wild pigs? The local area apparently has a lot of trouble with them destroying crops, etc., and I'd like to be part of the solution.
For camping, I like to carry as little as possible, something that apparently is called "ultra-light camping" these days. Years ago, I used to go out for weekend trips in the summer with a military rain poncho, a set of bungee cords, and poncho liner, and that was my tent and sleeping bag. I'd like to expand into spring and fall camping as well, but still carry the minimum in terms of tent / sleeping gear. Any suggestions? And does anyone have thoughts on the military's "sleep system"? Also, any advice on hiking / trekking / hunting boots would appreciated.
Let's talk horsemanship. I am a long-term beginner; I have ridden a couple times a year since I can remember. I would like to get a lot better. I'm not sure what my long-term goal is, but I have a couple of possible aims: I think it'd be a lot of fun to join a Civil War re-enactor cavalry unit, and I'd like to be able to do some longer-term trail riding / camping, or off-trail riding / camping. Any thoughts or advice on improving?
OK, on to knives. In a post from 2005, Grim mentions he carries a Gerber folding fighting knife. That was years ago and I'm curious whether it's still his preferred knife for daily carry. I'm also interested in any other opinions on these kinds of knives in general, and what I should get if I'm going to carry one.
Finally, if you have any other advice about any of these topics, whether gear, what / how to learn, groups or associations to check with, cautions, etc., I'd be glad of it.
Thanks in advance.
As for hunting, does anyone have advice for hunting wild pigs? The local area apparently has a lot of trouble with them destroying crops, etc., and I'd like to be part of the solution.
For camping, I like to carry as little as possible, something that apparently is called "ultra-light camping" these days. Years ago, I used to go out for weekend trips in the summer with a military rain poncho, a set of bungee cords, and poncho liner, and that was my tent and sleeping bag. I'd like to expand into spring and fall camping as well, but still carry the minimum in terms of tent / sleeping gear. Any suggestions? And does anyone have thoughts on the military's "sleep system"? Also, any advice on hiking / trekking / hunting boots would appreciated.
Let's talk horsemanship. I am a long-term beginner; I have ridden a couple times a year since I can remember. I would like to get a lot better. I'm not sure what my long-term goal is, but I have a couple of possible aims: I think it'd be a lot of fun to join a Civil War re-enactor cavalry unit, and I'd like to be able to do some longer-term trail riding / camping, or off-trail riding / camping. Any thoughts or advice on improving?
OK, on to knives. In a post from 2005, Grim mentions he carries a Gerber folding fighting knife. That was years ago and I'm curious whether it's still his preferred knife for daily carry. I'm also interested in any other opinions on these kinds of knives in general, and what I should get if I'm going to carry one.
Finally, if you have any other advice about any of these topics, whether gear, what / how to learn, groups or associations to check with, cautions, etc., I'd be glad of it.
Thanks in advance.
Interesting...
Mark Steyn has apparently decided to play for keeps.
Apart from the wisdom of his move, Steyn has set the table for something potentially very entertaining and enlightening: discovery on Mann's research. The general wisdom seems to be that Mann is completely out of his mind for putting himself in a position where this discovery was a possibility. Yesterday, the judge in the case denied the defendants' motion for dismissal, and he lifted the stay on discovery in the case.The discovery aspect, if the court permits it fairly, has the potential to be of considerable service to all of us. He is risking a serious price for the chance to do that service, however.
Wow! Time to stock up on popcorn, folks. And we wish Mr. Steyn all the best on this. While we worry about the (considerable) gamble he's taking, we can't help but admire the cojones he's putting on display...
Two on the NSA
Cass and I are having a discussion about the NSA, and the concentration of Federal Power generally, that some of you may be following.
On point is this piece on a NYT revelation about the NSA. This particular program (unlike many of the ones we have heard about lately) seems to have been correctly targeted and specific. The piece argues that its revelation harms national security without any counterbalancing benefit to the American people.
That's a good point, and in tackling the issue it's one we should consider. On the one hand, self-government requires knowledge -- and it requires ensuring that there is a capacity among the competing branches of government to oversee one another. On the other hand, many of these capacities are really only of use if they remain genuine secrets. It's a problem.
Another piece argues that we should protect not privacy but anonymity. This author is coming with a solution, so consider it carefully. What do you think?
UPDATE: NBC reports on a former NSA member who, at the National Press Club, said that during his tenure his agency spied on Congress, the rest of the military, and a candidate for the US Senate named Barack Obama. Saying it doesn't make it true, of course, but ought we -- or our representatives, at least -- not know?
On point is this piece on a NYT revelation about the NSA. This particular program (unlike many of the ones we have heard about lately) seems to have been correctly targeted and specific. The piece argues that its revelation harms national security without any counterbalancing benefit to the American people.
That's a good point, and in tackling the issue it's one we should consider. On the one hand, self-government requires knowledge -- and it requires ensuring that there is a capacity among the competing branches of government to oversee one another. On the other hand, many of these capacities are really only of use if they remain genuine secrets. It's a problem.
Another piece argues that we should protect not privacy but anonymity. This author is coming with a solution, so consider it carefully. What do you think?
UPDATE: NBC reports on a former NSA member who, at the National Press Club, said that during his tenure his agency spied on Congress, the rest of the military, and a candidate for the US Senate named Barack Obama. Saying it doesn't make it true, of course, but ought we -- or our representatives, at least -- not know?
Queensland: Losing The War On Bikers
One begins to think, given the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, that modern governments are bad at domestic wars. They may not be fit to wage foreign ones, for that matter.
The new laws are incredibly stiff, with up to 25 year prison sentences and a six-month mandatory minimum, including solitary confinement. Many of the offenses are the kinds of things that Americans would take as clear cases of free association ("three or more members of a criminal gang (including those listed by regulation), being together in a public place" -- meaning that 'being a criminal gang' is established by government fiat alone).
Doesn't seem to be working, there as here.
The new laws are incredibly stiff, with up to 25 year prison sentences and a six-month mandatory minimum, including solitary confinement. Many of the offenses are the kinds of things that Americans would take as clear cases of free association ("three or more members of a criminal gang (including those listed by regulation), being together in a public place" -- meaning that 'being a criminal gang' is established by government fiat alone).
Doesn't seem to be working, there as here.
C.S.A.
It being the holiday set aside for Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harvey Weinstein being in the news for his plan to make a movie that will destroy the NRA, I decided to celebrate the holiday by watching his film designed to destroy the South.
It's kind of an interesting film.
What strikes me is how they got some parts of the history so very right, and other parts wildly wrong. Unfortunately the "wildly wrong" parts are serious enough that the counterfactual America can't be taken seriously. Had the CSA won the Civil War, they had neither the desire nor the intention to annex the North. The reason they fought on defense for so long was that they really weren't competing for leadership of the American project or command of Washington, D.C. The basic assumption that guides the movie is therefore flawed.
Likewise, the movie fails to understand the way the South conceived of Jews in the antebellum period. This leads the film to suggest that the South would have sided with Hitler and expelled Jews from America. In fact, as historian Kenneth S. Greenberg points out, the South accepted Jews as full social equals of Christians, so much so that Christian gentlemen would fight duels with Jews. The duel, because it gives your opponent a fair and equal opportunity to kill you, is a radical statement of equality. Antisemitism wasn't 'mild' in the South (nor were Jews accidentally part of the Confederate government); rather, Jews were integral parts of Southern society.
For that matter, with a divided America at the time of the first World War, it may well be that there would have been no fertile ground for Hitler after that war. It was the American entry into the war, and subsequent creation of a decisive victory for the British and French, that resulted in German defeat and the punitive peace that gave rise to a Germany that would accept Hitler.
Still, the movie has some interesting bits. It does correctly describe the Southern attitude toward secession, complete with the reasoning behind the great seal of the Confederacy with George Washington depicted; and the aspirations for a larger 'tropical' empire that could expand into the Caribbean. The best part are the ads -- the movie's conceit is that it is a documentary about the CSA, and so the televised documentary is broken up by fake ads for products. It turns out that these ads carry a substantial part of the weight of the movie's hidden message, which is that the whole American project has been a fundamentally racist one. To realize why, though, you have to watch to the end.
You have to suspend a lot of disbelief, and let your enemy have his say. If you can, though, it may be interesting to hear what he really thinks. Maybe it's worth doing that on MLK day: a day of self-criticism and reflection.
It's kind of an interesting film.
What strikes me is how they got some parts of the history so very right, and other parts wildly wrong. Unfortunately the "wildly wrong" parts are serious enough that the counterfactual America can't be taken seriously. Had the CSA won the Civil War, they had neither the desire nor the intention to annex the North. The reason they fought on defense for so long was that they really weren't competing for leadership of the American project or command of Washington, D.C. The basic assumption that guides the movie is therefore flawed.
Likewise, the movie fails to understand the way the South conceived of Jews in the antebellum period. This leads the film to suggest that the South would have sided with Hitler and expelled Jews from America. In fact, as historian Kenneth S. Greenberg points out, the South accepted Jews as full social equals of Christians, so much so that Christian gentlemen would fight duels with Jews. The duel, because it gives your opponent a fair and equal opportunity to kill you, is a radical statement of equality. Antisemitism wasn't 'mild' in the South (nor were Jews accidentally part of the Confederate government); rather, Jews were integral parts of Southern society.
For that matter, with a divided America at the time of the first World War, it may well be that there would have been no fertile ground for Hitler after that war. It was the American entry into the war, and subsequent creation of a decisive victory for the British and French, that resulted in German defeat and the punitive peace that gave rise to a Germany that would accept Hitler.
Still, the movie has some interesting bits. It does correctly describe the Southern attitude toward secession, complete with the reasoning behind the great seal of the Confederacy with George Washington depicted; and the aspirations for a larger 'tropical' empire that could expand into the Caribbean. The best part are the ads -- the movie's conceit is that it is a documentary about the CSA, and so the televised documentary is broken up by fake ads for products. It turns out that these ads carry a substantial part of the weight of the movie's hidden message, which is that the whole American project has been a fundamentally racist one. To realize why, though, you have to watch to the end.
You have to suspend a lot of disbelief, and let your enemy have his say. If you can, though, it may be interesting to hear what he really thinks. Maybe it's worth doing that on MLK day: a day of self-criticism and reflection.
The Geometry of Herding Sheep
Over the winter break, I had the opportunity to help a friend move and sort some of his sheep. This was the first time I had worked with sheep, so my 'lessons learned' will be a novice's, but may be interesting to some.
There is a certain geometry to herding sheep. Two key points: their eyes take in quite a wide angle of the world, and they will avoid people. So, herding them means getting to a point where they are between you and where you want them to go. When there are two shepherds, there seems to be a perfect position for each that forms a triangle with the desired direction of movement; after half an hour, finding that position seemed to come intuitively to me, thanks to the constant feedback and opportunities for doing it over that sheep provide.
In moving sheep, sheepdogs are great if they know what you want; sheep will naturally follow them and the shepherd doesn't have to do anything. That said, they were mostly worthless that day, distracting me by wanting to play. Their main function is to guard the sheep, apparently. Sheep donkeys are just as good at leading sheep, and (from my extremely limited experience) more reliable in taking the lead. If you have both, however, the dogs will harrass the donkey. (I think the dogs are unionized.)
Finally, if it has a working horn, a 4-door sedan can be quite effective at herding sheep across a pasture, no matter how strange it feels to do so.
Apocalyptic skies
More from Rocket Science: Skies like these would make me want to do a quick inventory of my life.
So that's how you do it
Trouble engaging strangers?
At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. “I did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,” she said. “I wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.”
"Where did that come from?"
My husband suggests that the Martians have run behind the nearest rock, giggling hysterically.
Limited Connectivity Until Wednesday Or Thereabouts
There are some issues that are interfering with the connection between the physical Hall and the virtual one. Enjoy yourselves, as usual when I'm away; hopefully we'll get it sorted out the middle of next week, when our ISP can arrange a technician to drag himself way out here.
Models
The enduring fascination of war games must be the use of a model of a complex interaction to examine the myriad ways the process can play itself out. This WaPo article describes the modern incarnation of a coffee-table war-gaming tradition that flowered in the early 80s, dropped off a bit, and has experienced a resurgence with the ability of widely dispersed enthusiasts to connect via the Internet.
My own dear husband has designed a Civil War game (Cedar Mountain) that is now in the pre-sale period, where it must attain a certain number of orders before it will be officially launched--and it's getting there slowly. He plays games by email with co-enthusiasts all over the world. The games employ physical maps and counters, but the players can execute them long-distance, just as chessplayers might do. It's a wonderful aspect of worldwide instantaneous connection. It's also, as it turns out, a good way to become a whizz at graphics software. Whatever did we do without PCs?
We once spent a vacation driving up and down the Shenandoah Valley, locating battlefields that were never turned into parks. My husband can be annoyed by hamfisted cinematic portrayals of battles the same way I am whenever they attempt to portray any aspect of life in a law firm.
My own dear husband has designed a Civil War game (Cedar Mountain) that is now in the pre-sale period, where it must attain a certain number of orders before it will be officially launched--and it's getting there slowly. He plays games by email with co-enthusiasts all over the world. The games employ physical maps and counters, but the players can execute them long-distance, just as chessplayers might do. It's a wonderful aspect of worldwide instantaneous connection. It's also, as it turns out, a good way to become a whizz at graphics software. Whatever did we do without PCs?
We once spent a vacation driving up and down the Shenandoah Valley, locating battlefields that were never turned into parks. My husband can be annoyed by hamfisted cinematic portrayals of battles the same way I am whenever they attempt to portray any aspect of life in a law firm.
Friday Night AMV
Anime Music Video that is.
Grim once asked "Where are the Beethovens today?" I think my answer was that one had to look to music for movies these days.
Or, our young Beethoven is mucking about editing up things like this:
The Anime is called "Black Lagoon". It has, of course, no redeeming value, and is, of course, all the more entertaining for that.
Grim once asked "Where are the Beethovens today?" I think my answer was that one had to look to music for movies these days.
Or, our young Beethoven is mucking about editing up things like this:
The Anime is called "Black Lagoon". It has, of course, no redeeming value, and is, of course, all the more entertaining for that.
"On the Right"
Motes, beams, boys.
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.
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.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....
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
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.
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.
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.It's not just Afghanistan, of course.
"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!!"
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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!
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.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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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."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.
There are other ways in which the customs of Japanese society work to encourage equal respect.
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.
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.
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?
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.New Years' Even festivals mostly continued as planned, except for the horse-drawn carriages. It was too cold for the horses.
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.
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.
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,There's a very nice, appropriately rowdy version on this album.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
I'm happy with that.
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.
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:
But there's this too:
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.
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.
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 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.
Happiness and Slavery
A Think Progress story on the Robertson drama says:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 KrystmasseWith 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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....There's a good reason you shouldn't, which the article happens upon by accident:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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:
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. . . .
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.
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