Shopping

I think I'll swing by the store and pick up a loaf of bread this evening...

Oh, good. They have one.

UPDATE:

State of the Union -- everybody buys out the bread, nobody buys flour and yeast.

Reminds me of a song. Wonder if it's still true?

Bittersweet moments in history

According to the NBC Olympics sports anchors, the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one.  A little girl lets go of her shiny red balloon.

It brings to mind the foreboding with which Tories witnessed the severing of a promising young colony's ties with the British monarchy.  The sad moment when America watched Abraham Lincoln, with the stroke of a pen, consign their old friend slavery to its unquiet grave.  The heartbreaking disillusionment that led Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun to commit suicide in their bunker.  The wistful sighs when Nelson Mandela left his prison cell after decades of confinement.

The glorious experiment in human fulfillment that was the Soviet Union:  a civilization that is gone with the wind.   Where is the totalitarian collectivism of yesteryear?  Big Red Bear, we hardly knew ye.

"The End of Government"

I am strongly reminded of the old Marxist doctrine that, with the coming of Socialism, 'the state will wither away.'

Turns out!

Lying Birds

So I asked a question at the end of the post on lying, which used a bird in the wild as an example.



The question here is: do you think he could lie to you?

White House needs a Mulligan

A University of Chicago economist named Casey Mulligan deserves some credit for causing Washington bureaucrats to pay unaccustomed attention to the basic economics of subsidy programs like Obamacare, which raise the implicit marginal tax rate on low-income workers.  Mr. Mulligan's conclusion that Obamacare's effect would be to depress the labor participation rate (i.e., suppress jobs) made it into the CBO's recently ballyhooed report, which estimates that the new law would result in millions fewer fulltime jobs:

The CBO works in mysterious ways, but its commentary and a footnote suggest that two National Bureau of Economic Research papers Mr. Mulligan published last August were "roughly" the most important drivers of this revision to its model.  In short, the CBO has pulled this economist's arguments and analysis from the fringes to center of the health-care debate.

Author of a 2012 book entitled "The Redistribution Recession," Mr. Mulligan points out that it shouldn't surprise anyone that paying people to be un- or underemployed results in more un- or underemployment:

"[A]re we saying we were working too much before?  Is that the new argument?  I mean make up your mind.  We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done. . . .  Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy.  Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less?  We're pursuing our dreams?" 

The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market. 

He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating "our strong conclusion" that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually.  (Mr. Cutler has since qualified and walked back some of his claims.) 

"Why didn't they say, no, we didn't mean the labor market's going to get bigger.  We mean it's going to get smaller in a good way," Mr. Mulligan wonders. "I'm unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They're sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that." 

* * * 

Mr. Mulligan is uncomfortable speculating about whether the benefits of this shift outweigh the costs.  Perhaps the public was willing to trade market efficiency for more income security after the 2008 crisis.  "As an economist I can't argue with that," he says.  "The thing that I argue with is the denial that there is a trade-off.  I argue with the denial that if you pay unemployed people you're going to get more unemployed people. There are consequences of that.  That doesn't mean the consequences aren't worth paying.  But you can't deny the consequences for the labor market."

Friday Night AMV

Steampunk. Interesting how this has become a full blown sub-genre of science-fiction/fantasy literature.

American riches

Via Jonah Goldberg, a map matching each American state with the country whose GDP is closest to it. Probably because we're unfair or something.

Can't Win For Losing

There are days when even I almost feel sorry for the Obama administration. On the one side, there are ugly headlines because the Congressional Black Caucus is angry that he isn't making his every court pick with an eye toward their particular grievances.

On the other, when he does just that, you get ugly headlines too.

The White House's response to the CBC is somewhat amusing, however. Rather than withdraw the nominees causing controversy, they put up five new ones, "including two women, one Hispanic and an openly gay African-American." Diversity! Respect for community values!

Pick one.

Now There's A Story You Don't See Every Day...

'Pope's Harley Davidson sold at auction for charity.'

Great looking bike, too.

Benchmarks

A few weeks ago I put up Henry Rollins' attack on Toby Keith. It was not sympathetically received by the guests of the Hall.

Still, maybe Keith is blameworthy for not setting standards. He's guilty of letting people think that they are 'wild and crazy' no matter what they're doing. Some of his predecessors laid down markers.



Note the lyric: "It took fifteen beers to get here, I don't know how much 'till I leave." So fifteen beers is the baseline standard.



So that's triple shots, and three rounds of them. 9 total, but six of them are hard liquor.



Here the man drank just one beer. But it was free.

What It's Like Being Freed of Work

Gawker has an unusually insightful response to the story about 1 in 6 men now being liberated from work. They just decided to post some of their email from such men. One sample:

Soon after that, I lost everything. I lost my apartment, my furniture, my savings, my bank accounts, my credit cards and my once pristine credit rating. All gone, never to return.... I had a blood test this morning. There's nothing wrong. It's something my mom wants me to do each year as part of a regular check-up. I pray that the results come back with cancer or leukemia or something that will cause my demise. How sick is that? But I pray for the sweet release of death every night. My life ended 6 years ago. Now, I just exist. And I don't want to anymore.

Despair is a mortal sin. Those responsible for this policy, and the hardships it has caused, are in danger of killing both body and soul.

White House blinks . . . maybe

This article claims the Obama administration is thinking of patching up the grandfathering problem on existing health insurance coverage for another year or more.

Things are looking up

A triangular political graph

We've all taken those political quizzes that plot you on a rectilinear graph according to your place on the left/right libertarian/authoritarian spectra.  P.J. O'Rourke claims that every soul struggles with three forces:

Everybody by turns has libertarian impulses, “leave me alone,” and statist impulses, “please take care of me,” and anarchist moments, “the whole system is rigged, they’re all a bunch of bums.”

Should we adopt a triangular graph now?  Or is he simply emphasizing the point he makes elsewhere in the interview, that the Baby Boomers are good at everything but duty, which would be the four point on the usual political compass?

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Liar

I can teach my children that it is wrong to steal with a mostly clean conscience, because it’s been a long time since my preteen shoplifting days. But when it comes to lying, the situation is different. I don’t remember having told any lies in the past week, but I know that if I reviewed a detailed recording of that time I’d catch myself in several. So can I really sincerely insist that I believe it is wrong to lie?

The truth is, I cheerfully lie to myself about my weaknesses and my abilities every day simply in order to keep myself moving forward. My ambitions would be very modest if they were determined entirely by my past achievements—and many of my achievements were possible only because I believed, with no good reason, that I could accomplish them.

The most interesting aspect of this article is the assertion that lying is fundamental to animal communication. In human beings -- children -- the capacity to lie is sometimes taken to be the moment at which a new kind of consciousness emerges. When I can think of my communication as false, and theorize about how you will receive it and whether it will fool you in a way that is beneficial to me, then I'm doing something different from simply trying to convey something to you. I have an idea that you have a mind too, and that mind can come apart from the facts of the world. I can shape how you think.

So is that going on with the bird who trails his wing to feign an injury? Or is that just the product of a random mutation? The answer has significant consequences in terms of what kind of being we encounter in the wild.

Oh, For the Love Of...

Writing about the current trend for beards, the Atlantic produces a piece suggesting that American beards have a "racially fraught" history that is also about oppressing women.

Also, in hard economic times it's cheaper not to buy razors. Also, the immediate antecedent isn't the 19th century but the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. They aren't looking back to Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, though they had magnificent beards. The hipsters are thinking of the hippies who served as the extras on Paint Your Wagon.

Those guys grew beards because it was more 'natural' and 'back to the earth,' which it really is. Turns out the thing grows there if you don't do anything to stop it. Natural fertility, man. Man's like a wheat field. Groovy.

Of course, some of us grow beards because our fathers grew beards and our wives like it. That's not a trend, it's a tradition. It makes no reference to race, and the only reference it makes to the rights of woman is her right to be free to enjoy a mighty beard on her husband.

Enjoy Your Freedom From Working

I’m done, guys. If we’ve reached the stage of welfare-state decadence where it’s a selling point for a new entitlement that it discourages able-bodied people from working, there’s no reason to keep going. We’ve lost, decisively.

As a great man once said, remember me as I am — filled with murderous rage.

This would be a good point to commission a poll. Are you really not working because you don't want a job, or because you can't find one? I'd like to know where the American people are on this. If it's the former, well, that's got consequences.

If it's the latter, maybe things could still be fixed. Of course, you're still poor from being unemployed, with no access to capital, skills that are degraded from being out of the workforce, and huge regulatory burdens including Obamacare keeping you from starting a business or getting a job with an existing one.

But at least we have a wheelbarrow.

A Parody

Not a parody:

In response, Susan Rice, the US national security adviser, issued a series of tweets on Tuesday denouncing the criticism. “Personal attacks in Israel directed at Sec Kerry totally unfounded and unacceptable,” Ms Rice wrote in one tweet.

Four from Drudge

Drudge is a very effective propagandist, or would be if he worked for a government (since part of the definition of "propaganda" includes that it is government activity). He draws three stories together as headlines in close proximity, under a broader headline that Scalia is talking about the SCOTUS re-authorizing internment camps.

Story one is a tale of a militarized police raid on a house thought to contain nonviolent criminals, none of whom were actually there. The video demonstrates that the difference between a "knock" and "no knock" raid has largely collapsed.

Ross says he didn’t hear the police announcement until after one officer had already attempted to kick in the door. Had that officer been successful, there’s a good chance that Ross, the police officer, or both would be dead. The police department would then have inevitably argued that Ross should have known that they were law enforcement. But you can’t simultaneously argue that these violent, volatile tactics are necessary to take suspects by surprise and that the same suspects you’re taking by surprise should have known all along that they were being raided by police. Well you can, and police do, and judges and prosecutors usually support them. But the arguments don’t logically coexist.

Story two is a follow-up story on Kelo v. New London, showing that -- after the government's seizing and destroying of people's homes, for 'economic development' -- nothing ever got built.

Story three is another story about the closures and fines of children's lemonade stands.

Of the four stories, the one about Scalia is a report on an academic conference at which he offered some provocative but theoretical thoughts; the Kelo piece is about a historic injustice, but one ten years old; and the lemonade piece is about a small number of overweening idiots in government across the country. Only the piece about the police raid points to a current, urgent problem.

Sure looks awful on Drudge, though.

Rx

Bookworm Room linked to this article about a new product for battlefield medics.

I was just reading a early-twentieth-century piece musing about the technological advances of the nineteenth century, and wondering whether the twentieth century could possible sustain the pace.

What's Holding Back The Economy?

Here are two articles that do not rhyme, but do harmonize. The first is by Spengler, writing about the factors that are holding up the economy -- and why he thinks he has to jettison his free-market convictions to fix them. The regulatory "reign of terror" combined with the uncertainty of Obamacare's implementation are discouraging hiring and job growth. But so is a decaying infrastructure, and the absence of buying power among Americans. To fix this, he suggests an FDR-style jobs program aimed at reconstructing employment, buying power, and the infrastructure at the same time.

This should be no surprise in retrospect, given two disastrous underlying trends. One is the decline of real median household income....

The other is the collapse of the labor force participation rate, which is the flip side of the coin: if fewer adults are working, median household income will be lower. It’s even worse than it looks, because Americans who have jobs are working fewer hours. Average hours worked are down 1% from pre-recession levels. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s the equivalent of 1.4 million jobs in a labor force of 140 million. The U.S. has restored 2.5 million jobs since the financial crash, but adjusted for hours worked, it’s the equivalent of just 1.1 million jobs.

The other article is from the NYT, which focuses on the effect of the two "disastrous underlying trends" identified. There's no point trying to sell to anyone except the rich:

In 2012, the top 5 percent of earners were responsible for 38 percent of domestic consumption, up from 28 percent in 1995, the researchers found.

Even more striking, the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

More broadly, about 90 percent of the overall increase in inflation-adjusted consumption between 2009 and 2012 was generated by the top 20 percent of households in terms of income, according to the study, which was sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a research group in New York.

Their solution is unspecified, but the clear implication is that America can't get back on track until people have money to spend. Of course, to have money to spend, they'll need a job: the thing that distinguishes the upper classes they are talking about from the lower classes is that they tend to have two jobs, as well as access to wealth from investments so that they are not wholly dependent on work for wealth.

There's a strong agreement on the need to find a way to infuse work-earned wealth into the lower classes (including what remains of the middle class). Spengler's on stronger ground because he also recognizes the damage being done by regulation, especially of health care but also of other industries.

Interesting to see the right and left come together on a big-government vision for the future. But they seem to agree on amnesty, too. Of course, amnesty happens to directly conflict with the goal of creating fuller employment among the existing lower classes... but it will help ensure political support for big-government programs.

More fun with science

This would make a good elevator.  Not a lift, but what Heinlein would have called a bounce tube, something you step into in order to be gently lowered to the ground floor.

Secular holidays

I understand there's some kind of sporting event on TV late this afternoon.  I made the mistake of going to the store hungry on the way home from church, and came home with armsful of makings for nachos etc.  Even so, my spread won't be up to these standards:



H/t Powerline.

Horseman

He was ninety-two years old, more than fifty spent working around horses, so he knew what was about to happen when he saw it. Fortunately, he was a true man.

Why, This One

Dylan Farrow asks you to imagine something. Then, she asks: "Now, what's your favorite Woody Allen movie?"

This one, of course.



Somewhere between two and three and a half minutes, we get as close to honesty as you're likely to see in art. Now you know why he could write that scene.

Pakistan: When Is A Husband Justified In Beating His Wife?

A poll. The graphic is a little funny. You can switch it from male to female, and if you aren't paying attention it looks like men are more likely to think they are entitled to beat their wives under certain circumstances. But notice that when you swap the sex, the scale at the bottom of the graph changes. It looks like less than a fifth of men believe they are entitled to beat their wives for any of these causes, but nearly a third of women agree that wives should be beaten for most of them.

Georgia Legislature Senate Resolution 736

A RESOLUTION

1 Applying for a convention of the states under Article V of the United States Constitution; and
2 for other purposes.

3 WHEREAS, the founders of the Constitution of the United States empowered state
4 legislators to be guardians of liberty against future abuses of power by the federal
5 government; and

6 WHEREAS, the federal government has created a crushing national debt through improper
7 and imprudent spending; and

8 WHEREAS, the federal government has invaded the legitimate roles of the states through
9 the manipulative process of federal mandates, most of which are unfunded to a great extent;
10 and

11 WHEREAS, the federal government has ceased to live under a proper interpretation of the
12 Constitution of the United States; and

13 WHEREAS, it is the solemn duty of the states to protect the liberty of our people,
14 particularly for the generations to come, by proposing amendments to the Constitution of the
15 United States through a convention of the states under Article V of the United States
16 Constitution to place clear restraints on these and related abuses of power.

17 NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF
18 GEORGIA that the General Assembly of the State of Georgia hereby applies to Congress,
19 under the provisions of Article V of the Constitution of the United States, for the calling of
20 a convention of the states limited to proposing amendments to the United States Constitution
21 that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of
22 the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of
23 Congress.

24 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Secretary of the Senate is hereby directed to transmit
25 copies of this application to the President and Secretary of the United States Senate and to
26 the Speaker and Clerk of the United States House of Representatives, to transmit copies to
27 the members of the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives from
28 this state, and to transmit copies hereof to the presiding officers of each of the legislative
29 houses in the several states, requesting their cooperation.

30 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that this application constitutes a continuing application in
31 accordance with Article V of the Constitution of the United States until the legislatures of
32 at least two-thirds of the several states have made applications on the same subject.

Just in committee for now, and of course it may not survive the legislative process. Even if it does, more than thirty other states would have to file similar demands before Article V can be invoked.

Still, it's a start.

Going In For Guns

My answer to Eric's question about 'what more you could want'... how about a band called Dos Gringos, apparently made up of F-16 pilots? This song is the cleanest one I could find. That is to say, it's just as clean as you'd expect from a band made up of veteran fighter pilots.



Anybody who looks up the rest of their tunes is forewarned: some of them are a whole lot less clean. Let the buyer beware.

A Conundrum

Earlier today, someone directed me to this article on the online harassment of women. I've been pondering the problem today, and it's a very difficult one.

I'm going to take the author at her word about the scale of the problem. I don't actually know that she's right about it, and as she apparently writes a column about sex, it may be that there is a lightning-rod effect in terms of drawing sexually-aggressive responses. On the other hand, she cites some evidence that backs up her position that this is a problem on the kind of very large scale she's describing. So, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm just going to assume she's completely right about the facts, and consider what might be done about it.

She has several implied measures that she thinks would improve things, all of which prove to be problematic on even a moment's consideration:

1) Police action. The problems here are twofold:

(a) The very scale of the problem defies policing as a workable response. Even with the right tools (see the next point), it would take hours to chase down a positive identification on an anonymous comment left on a blog, or one of these "tweets." You'd have to contact the ISP or online service, get the data, and then do the work of tracking it back to the specific IP address. Then, you'd have to do the work necessary to prove that the individual you're planning to arrest is the one guy who was using that anonymous account at that specific IP address at that moment.

This is all very workable if the problem we're talking about is, say, terrorism. The incidents of terrorism are rare enough that you can run each one to ground. But she's talking about something that, according to her report, happens millions of times a day. If every cop in America did nothing else, the very scale of the problem puts it outside their power to solve. You couldn't even prosecute enough of a percentage to make an impact, so the prosecutions would have to serve as meaningful symbols. But given the difficulty of proving that the IP address ties to a specific person beyond a reasonable doubt, as well as given the possibility of 1st Amendment defenses ("She misunderstood: that was intended as parody, which is protected free speech")... well, you could easily end up losing your meaningful symbolic prosecutions, sending exactly the opposite message intended.

There's a problem with symbolic prosecutions anyway, but if you're going to make an example, it has to work.

(b) As she is herself aware, many of the tools that the police would need to address these issues effectively are the very tools that people are objecting to the NSA leveraging. Now presumably there would be less problem with police doing it, in an open environment of due process and subpoenas. Still, there is a legitimate counterbalancing interest in limiting the government's ability to do what the police would have to be able to do to be as effective as they could be. It may not be the case that there is the political will, or trust in the state, to hand over the powers they would require.

This compounds the difficulty of bringing off effective symbolic prosecutions. You can't afford to lose, because the symbol is all you've got, but you may be denied some of the evidence you require by privacy advocates (and may encounter a jury hostile to police snooping on internet activity, who could therefore find the 1A defenses more palatable than one moved chiefly by outrage at the things said to the women).

2) More female police. There are two problems with this, too:

(a) There's no draft for police. Women aren't choosing to be police officers in greater numbers because that's not what they want to do with their lives. You could make a case that women have a duty to do this, but unless women are persuaded by that case, you certainly can't make them.

(b) Even in the case of the FBI, which works extremely hard to recruit as many women agents as possible, her own evidence suggests that the very high percentage of women (19%) has not led to institutional changes making prosecutions more likely. This may be because the ratio of hot air to serious threats has proven to be so low. Again, we're talking about apparently millions of offenses a day; the actual number of these that turn into physical stalkers or attackers is so much lower that the FBI may be acting rationally in focusing its efforts elsewhere. Compared to their counterintelligence mission, for example, time invested here is much less likely to uncover and stop a serious threat; and if it does, it's a threat to one person, whereas a counterintelligence risk could threaten very many.

3) More female game designers and software engineers. The problem here is the same as 2a: "While the number of women working across the sciences is generally increasing, the percentage of women working in computer sciences peaked in 2000 and is now on the decline."

4) Get offline. This is a solution for the individual, if they're willing to pay the price she talks about in great detail. It's not a solution for the society, unless we want the internet to be a public space like a Saudi shopping mall.

5) Enable software to block hateful messages. As she points out, this will greatly improve the experience for the woman, though it takes a constant effort. However, it doesn't actually do anything at all to deal with the one person who is really a danger.

6) Treat the whole internet as a Title VII area, which is subject to intense Federal scrutiny aimed at preventing harassment of women. This has all the problems of (1), especially because (as the author of the suggestion admits) the real intent is to pressure police into working harder on this problem. It's also not going to improve the underlying tension between the sexes to extend all the pleasures of the office or campus Equal Opportunity Department to all our private internet activity. If anything, I'd think this would increase the number of men inclined to hate and lash out at women.

7) Protect yourself. The author tried to use a protective order, and describes how difficult it was to obtain (and how overwhelmed the courts are anyway). She lives in California, so she can't carry a gun (and perhaps wouldn't anyway); but even if she had one, she would have to wait until she found herself in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury to use it. This could solve the most serious aspect of the problem -- an actual assault or rape attempt -- but only for those women who are willing to kill another person. That's not every woman, and that's not their fault.

I would have to say that the best workable solution is some combination of 5 and 7, combined with some efforts by everyone to make clear that this kind of behavior is not acceptable. Of course, aside from deleting comments here at the Hall, there's nothing I can do to actually enforce that. And, also of course, the whole pleasure of doing it is that it is offensive to people. Making clear that it's offensive and inappropriate isn't going to stop them, or even slow them down.

It's a difficult problem, at least for the non-DL-Sly's of the world. I suspect she's got this. But not everyone is like her!

UPDATE: Cathy Young attacks the premise I was granting in paragraph two. She's got a good argument in parts, though in the end I think she is monumentally unfair to the NYT's Douthat. I don't think I agree with his conclusion either -- we need not a new vision of masculinity, but a restoration of the old one -- but it ought to be clear that his position is far better than the kind of attacks that we're talking about here. His final lines are remarkable for their respect for the quality of women's influence, while asserting men's responsibility: "Forging this vision is a project for both sexes. Living up to it, and cleansing the Internet of the worst misogyny, is ultimately a task for men."

He may be wrong about that one-sided responsibility, too. But he's not the enemy of women: if anything, he's erring in the other direction.

Friday Night AMV

Angsty Teenagers. Check.
Giant Fighting Robots. Check.
Angsty Teenagers piloting Giant Fighting Robots. Check.
Invading Aliens. Check.
Giant guns. Check.
Robot-fu. Check.
Large amounts of property damage. Check.

What more do you want?

Great.

Now I want to go to Mars.

Big Brother Guitars

Gibson Guitars pokes some fun at the gubmint.

Pete Seeger died recently, or I'm sure he'd be writing a protest song about this.

The un-Superbowl ad

How to film a Superbowl ad that doesn't cost anything and won't be run during the Superbowl.

I Never Again Want To Hear...

...that argument about how some good or service is so basic to human dignity that government should provide it.

Stetsons

Since Tom was asking about gear, here's an old post I wrote about selecting a Stetson hat. I found it because, by coincidence, someone dropped by yesterday to comment on what is now a seven-year-old post!

I don't know that it's still true that bricks-and-mortar stores sell them cheaper. Seven years ago, it was. Some of the other advice is probably outdated too. But there's still a lot of use.

A Small Sliver of America

Watch as a small business' employees learn about their new health care plan. They are not happy campers.

Shame

Watts Up With That posts a guest column suggesting that the "pause in global warming" risks destroying the reputation of science.  I disagree.  What destroyed the reputation of a lot of scientists, and the confidence of thinking people in a particular arm of the scientific community, was the subversion of their scientific professionalism and honesty to wishful thinking and political expediency.  The "pause in warming" was simply the evidence that exposed them.

Cheap microscope

If this isn't just about the coolest thing ever.


H/t Maggie's Farm.

And now for something completely different

DL Sly made me do it.  Cassandra didn't stop me.

SOTU or STFU?

Those darned Republicans, always obstructing the President's plans for greatness.

Wanted and found

You may recall my post about the death of my neighbors' 14-year-old grandson Sam last August.  The driver of the truck that crossed the median and struck Sam's car, killing him and the car's driver, was on parole at the time.  He was badly injured and spent some weeks in the hospital--but then somehow he was allowed to leave the hospital without being taken into custody.  By the time he was indicted in late November, he was in the wind.

He was found yesterday, however, in Arkansas, and will be brought back here for trial.

The defendant has a moderately impressive rap sheet.  The police told my neighbors that, in the minutes before the fatal crash, he had nearly run several other cars off the road.  An accident waiting to happen, as they say.

The man's son, who was also in the wreck, has received more favorable public notice.

Honors

Why not?  The Nobel Peace Prize couldn't get much more degraded than it already is.  I'm sure the President would be thrilled to share his honor with Mr. Snowden.

Uh-oh

American bankers are jumping off buildings in London.  HSBC, a London bank, inquires innocently of its customers what they plan to do with that cash they propose to withdraw, if they should by any chance be allowed to do so?  Investors cast nervous eyes on the Chinese banking system.  Turkey enacts drastic interest-rate hikes in failed bid to halt the collapse of their currency.  Argentina and Venezuela--oh, there's no point following any further details in their concerted efforts to destroy their economies.

Granted that a currency and an economic system are based in large part on what people believe, there's still an apparent limit to how much can be achieved by lying.  Signals from reality have an inconvenient habit of intruding.

No need, therefore, to address any of the usual nonsense contained in the SOTU address.

Atlanta metro area paralyzed by global warming

Fifty schoolchildren trapped on buses.  I assume our host is pretty frozen in.  The frigid air just missed us to the east; we've been hovering in the mid-30s day and night.

Making sense

Rand Paul responds informally to the SOTU.  It's crazy, he says, to send our money to central planners in Washington and hope they'll send it back in such a way as to create jobs.  It's not that the government is stupid, he observes--"though that's an open question"--but that it can't match the focused, close-up, personal performance of the original owner in picking winners and losers.

It's nice to watch a politician who's not afraid of basic free-market economics and knows how to expound them in plain English.

But Of Course

"96% of Dems Who Support Raising Minimum Wage Don't Pay Their Interns."

Well, I mean, you should pay more for your labor. I'm doing these kids a service, what with all the exposure I'm giving them.

Funny thing about exposure:

American Wins Syria

Winning by not losing may be an even better strategy if you are not fighting, suggests the National Interest.

The U.S. is right to seek a quick settlement to the civil war in Syria. The humanitarian costs alone compel America to push for reconciliation between the warring sides. Nonetheless, the legitimate desire to end the conflict does not diminish the reality that the U.S. is winning in Syria. From a purely strategic standpoint, no country has benefitted more from the horrible tragedy in Syria than the United States.

There's a lot of hemming and hawing at the opening and closing of the article about how 'of course' none of this justifies allowing the war to continue in a prolonged, grinding way. The humanitarian concerns alone justify ending it as soon as possible.

Just, you know, noting the fact that it's really worked out great that these guys have been killing each other for years now.

Tough Sell

My sister did once talk me into doing "the Warrior Dash" with her. It was kind of fun, because you couldn't possibly take it seriously. (She chided me that we were never going to get a good time, because I kept stopping to help people over the obstacles if they were having trouble. But really, courtesy aside, that's what you should do: if it's meant to be a quasi-military event, the military moves as a unit. Helping your brothers and sisters over the obstacles means the unit gets there faster, and can bring its power to bear as designed. It just happens this particular unit is especially flabby.)

I also like the beard. I don't have the long hair, but my beard is pretty thick this winter.

More nullification

Connecticut is surprised and disappointed that so many of its gun owners failed to take advantage of a new opportunity to register their weapons and magazines.  No doubt, as one newspaper speculated, the problem was that many were prepared to meet the deadline on New Year's Eve, but were taken by surprise when the office shut early at noon.

Doctrine

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine represents a leap forward in accountability for states and does not infringe upon their sovereignty, as states are no longer held to be completely self-contained entities with absolute power over their populations. Rather, there is a strictly defined corpus of actions that begin the R2P process — a process that has different levels of corrective action undertaken by the international community in order to persuade, cajole and finally coerce states into actively taking steps to prevent atrocities from occurring within their boundaries. That R2P does not violate sovereignty stems from the evolution of sovereignty from its Westphalian form in the mid 17th century to the “sovereignty as responsibility” concept advanced by Deng, et al. Modern sovereignty can no longer be held to give states carte blanche in their internal affairs regardless of the level of suffering going on within their borders.

That's a mouthful, if you intend to apply it to real states.

Nullification

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.

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:

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.

So that's how Paul is going to deal with the media efforts to lure Republicans into playing the Democrats' war on women game.

Of course, Paul's a libertarian, and so he's one of those on the Right most inclined to let the whole business go.

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.

Well Done!

Arms & Armor. Keep scrolling.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

Way harsh

But fair.  My opinion of Wendy Davis, never high, is crumbling.

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.

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.

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.

Hidden art

This makes me want to go thumb through some old books.

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.”

Friday Night AMV

I think even Grim would want one of these machines.

"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.

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.

"On the Right"

Motes, beams, boys.

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

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

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

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

States Against The NSA

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

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

Accidents Happen

Heh.

American Foreign Policy

Mac Owens is not impressed.

How Should A Woman Appear In Public?

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

The Gates Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not just Afghanistan, of course.

Sir Run Run Shaw

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



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

Rest in peace.

The Glories of Black Iron

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

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

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

Ouch

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

"Harmless" Pranks

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

More hate speech

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

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

The monetary leap for freedom

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

The things we find to complain about

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

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

Federalism

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

The enduring fascination of marriage

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

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

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

How Capitalist is North Korea?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little Sisters, Local 316

This is an exceptional parody from Scrappleface.

The Madness of 'Equality of Respect'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome, Magpul

Wyoming and Texas probably are using unfair competitive practices.

The Right Season to Leave

It's Fine, But It's Not Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do what you want. Just maintain the distinctions.

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

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

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

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

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

State Secession

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

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

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

Global Warming Update

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

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

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

Unemployment

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

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

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