A Source for Further Anecdotes, if Not Statistics

The CATO Institute has apparently opened a project on police misconduct, not limited to SWAT teams, which is attempting to aggregate news that may inform the longstanding debate we've had here. Some of the allegations are insignificant because they're trying to aggregate everything, and it's of no matter to us that a policeman got a DUI (say). It's true that this means he's breaking the laws he is sworn to enforce, but we aren't interested in whether policemen are saints. Of course they are not. A momentary lapse on the part of a single officer is not telling, and indeed may not even indicate that the one particular cop is generally unfit. Anyone can have a bad day.

We're not even really interested in cases of outright corruption, such as the case mentioned of stealing gasoline for personal use from the county depot. It may be true or false, but it doesn't affect our concern about whether the relationship between the police and the citizenry has become unhealthy. No one expects a society in which there is no corruption.

Still, there remain plenty of items that do apply to our question about the relationship between the police and the citizenry. Here's a very recent incident they're tracking. This was a mixed race marriage, so what the police saw was a large black man chasing a Latina. In the context of our culture's usual assumption that black men are violent and predatory toward women, that might have alarmed the police. The man then tried to shove past them when they got between him and her.

Phase shifts

One minute the tower is standing.  The next, it's rubble and dust.  Richard Fernandez on the hollowing out of societies before the final collapse:

One reason why Japan recovered relatively quickly after the Second World War was while the massive aerial assault leveled Japan’s cities it did not destroy the cultural and social institutions of Japan.  When the smoke cleared the Japanese were still there and they rebuilt.  By contrast destroying culture is so much more lethal.  Detroit was untouched by the war.  Not a bomb fell on it.  But years of public education worked their magic.  It dismantled the culture and social institutions which once built its factories.  Time reports Detroit had posted the lowest math scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“These numbers are only slightly better than what one would expect by chance as if the kids had never gone to school and simply guessed at the answers,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts.  “These numbers … are shocking and appalling and should not be allowed to stand.”

Scientific literacy

Maggie's Farm links to a horrified Discovery.com article citing a poll showing 1/4 of Americans don't know that the Earth revolves around the Sun.  The author leaps right to the American enthusiasm for creationism science, but I think instead about this kind of article:

Yes, Global Warming can totally produce colder winters.
And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

That's just the first two pages of Google hits.

Aerial view of Grim's house

I got it off of Google maps.  Or else from Maggie's Farm, where it depicts Gwynnie's family cabins near the Donner Pass.  There are three cabins in the photo.

A man's car for manly men

And while we're on the subject of the place of the American car in the American psyche, here's a terrific Cadillac commercial courtesy of Ace:



It won't do to try to make the ad make sense, but it's very effective if you let that part go.  The important thing to remember is:  effete Frenchmen wouldn't understand.  And it's electric, baby.

'Taint Union Country

At least, not in Tennessee's VW plant.

 

The WaPo's reporter is pretty unhappy about it, too.  The 53-47 vote was "close" and probably a result of unfair tactics employed by Republic lawmakers and outside agitators.  A vote against the union is an inexplicable vote against Workers' Councils that could cooperate with management in implementing employee ideas!  Though why management couldn't institute and listen to Workers' Councils at any time, with or without a union, I can't imagine.

Another anecdote. Or data point. Take your pick.

The comments are uniformly negative on the police.

Glenn Reynolds posted this item on his site and has over 100 comments last I looked, and they're also uniformly negative.

So what? You might say. Well, I remember a young black stand up comedian, sometime in the 1980's doing a joke about the Los Angeles police--'BANG BANG BANG--FREEZE!" much like the audio suggests in the film, and it all got a laugh at the time, because well, if that was happening, it was happening to minorities in minority neighborhoods. 

The people commenting are basically middle class Americans. The sort that used to support the police. They're not, anymore.

Friday Night AMV

I guess this is appropriate....given the day.



I'm always interested in seeing different culture's takes on other culture's literature/stories/myths/etc...

Although this would work too.

I didn't see the original movie, but I think I'd watch this one.

Coastal valentine

Our Representatives in Washington

Hey, how'd you vote on that bill to spend tons of money?

On an average day, any C-SPAN viewer would know how senators voted in real time because votes are read aloud. (See our post on the six senators who appear to have changed their votes.) But on Wednesday, the clerks did not name names. Instead of announcing the rolling vote tally as the vote went along on the critical motion to limit debate on the debt limit measure, senators were allowed to cast their votes in relative secrecy.

Turns out one of my Senators didn't vote at all. I guess once you announce your impending retirement, it's not so important to get around to voting on the future of the nation.

"Cassandra of the Week"

It's hard for us to recognize any Cassandra aside from our own, but hat's off to an NSA "threat predictor" (presumably their version of the Red Cell) who warned about Edward Snowden. In 1996.

St. Valentine's Day Post

How about a post on the Medieval Spanish debate about the role and status of women? The terms of the debate among modern scholars are kind of strange:

There are also a number of studies on the sources and traditions informing two superficially differentiated currents. The first is defined by a somewhat misogynistic approach, generally described as medievalising and with its roots in the Old Testament. The second is a more progressive one which has been perceived, not without unhealthy doses of presentism and anachronism, as protofeminist, in defence of women and usually linked to an incipient lay and humanist philosophy.

Calling the reference to the ancient Old Testament "medievalizing" demonstrates some unwarranted assumptions about the Middle Ages, especially since the "humanizing" argument was a product of the Medievals in reaction to the ancients and their defenders. We still have defenders of the ancient view in the Modern age, but nobody would call them "modernizing."

In any case, you might enjoy reading about the poem, in this article on "Hugo de Urriés and Egalitarian Married Life." (H/t: Medievalists.net.)

Bread & Circuses, Day V

As expected, the snow that was melting into slush yesterday froze into a solid sheet of ice overnight. My scouting yesterday led me to believe that it would be fine to drive if you could get to the road, so I pulled the van down the driveway and parked it by the road last night before things re-froze.

However, that still meant getting down to the van this morning. Our driveway is a good length for one in rural Georgia, and the house was wisely built by its original owners on a hilltop. As a consequence, there was a length of serious ice to traverse in order to reach the van, and my wife had to go out this morning.

I went with her, and broke holes in the ice for her to walk in. She can't stomp hard with her recently broken leg, which is still healing, although she can now walk again. With patience we eventually reached the bottom of the hill, and she had no trouble getting the van up onto the roads, which seem to be completely clear except in shadowy places. I'd scouted a route to the nearest state highway that should be clear all the way.

This is why I get away with so much the rest of the time.

Bread & Circuses, Day IV

Things are good today. I scouted the roads on foot as far as the state highway, and they're mostly clear after the sun we had today. If you can get down the driveway, you can get where you want. In spite of the ice and snow, we never did lose power. It's been a pretty pleasant interlude, honestly.

How are things for you, Eric Blair?

But of Course

At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.

In Praise of Georgia's Politicians

Townhall magazine has some kind words for a Republican governor and a Democratic mayor, who pulled it together pretty well for this ice and snow storm. It helped that we had the 'dry run' just a bit earlier, however, to help them work out the kinks.

Bread, Day III

Sent the neighbors another loaf of bread, because apparently their growing boy eats a lot of it. Power and comms still operative as of now. The ice is still falling, and another inch or few are expected tonight, but the winds haven't been as bad as predicted.

So far, all is well.

Well, This Should Be Fun

Nothing bothersome yet, but they've convinced me that tomorrow is going to be a fun day. May be a few fun days before it's over.

Blurred lines

I had very sharp vision in my youth.  In my mid-twenties, I started to get near-sighted and reconciled myself to wearing glasses.  In my forties, I started to get the far-sightedness that is usual for that age, which for a while nearly canceled out my near-sightedness.  Now I can't see well near or far, though my uncorrected vision isn't really that bad:  about 20/60.

I was aware it had been a long time since I'd seen the eye doctor, but was embarrassed to find that their records show it has been eight years.  Strangely, though my vision had noticeably degraded in the last few years, the visual acuity exam suggested the same prescription.  Sure enough, the glasses, when they arrived, were disappointing.  They were great for close-up fine-gauge crochet work, but for things more than about four feet out, there was no difference with them on or with them off.

When I went back in, they tried every explanation in the book, up to and including wild variations in blood sugar--not an issue, according to a recent blood test.  "Well, have you been wearing the glasses?"  Not since I found they didn't make the tiniest difference.  "Maybe you're just not used to glasses."  Oh, come on, really?  I tried them for three days.  The only good explanation I could think of was that I'd never before had my eyes dilated before the visual acuity test.  The eye doctor's personnel didn't seem to think that could be it, but there's no doubt that when they retested me that day, without dilation, the prescription was quite different and they were able to correct me back to better than 20/20, whereas on the first go-round they could achieve only 20/20 in one eye and 20/25 in the other.  In a week or so when the new lenses arrive, we'll see.

In the meantime, I've been trying to read up on whether it's a good idea to dilate the eyes before a visual acuity test.  The answer is proving hard to pin down.  Have any of you guys run into this?

Bread, Day II

The snow today is thick and heavy, the kind of snow that rolls up wonderfully into snowmen or snow-forts. The neighborhood children are off having an idyllic childhood memory.

My wife tells me that our nearest neighbor wasn't able to buy bread yesterday, so I sent them one of the loaves from last night, and made two more.

This is the old way.



UPDATE:

The 911 service just put out an automated message warning, in effect, to expect the end of civilization for a few days -- loss of power, impassable roads, etc. So, OK. Possibly don't expect to hear from us again for a while, but don't worry about us. Barring accident, we'll be fine.

Civil Support

Is the least believable part of this National Guard drill that right-wing gun-loving terrorists would stage a biological threat against the government, or that these hard-right crazies would be members of the local teachers' union?

The Tea Party and Aristotle's Rhetoric

Ace accuses the Tea Party of being hostile to considering popular opinion in their positions. For this reason, he considers them "a movement not of politics but of political philosophy." His criticism is not for their beliefs, but rather that their insistence on ignoring popular opinion naturally limits their power, and he wants them to be politically powerful, to maybe even replace the Republican Party.

I have seen first-hand what Ace is talking about. I was one of the organizers for a local Tea Party group, but after the rest of the leadership insisted on ideological purity rather than getting results, I left the movement. To be fair, they thought ideological purity would get the results they wanted. However, while I am sympathetic to the idea that one man and the truth are a majority, elections don't work that way. I could (and still can) see some ways in which Tea Party concerns are shared by the base of the left, and if we could frame things the right way, and cut some deals, we could achieve some important objectives.

Compromise, especially with the left, was not interesting to the rest of the leadership. They wanted all or nothing, believing they could get it all if only they were pure enough. They saw the left as very real enemies who could not be dealt with. Although it was never said, I got the impression that compromising with leftist groups, even if it got results we wanted, would sully the movement and should be disdained. We had to win by outright defeating them; that was the only acceptable answer. Completely outnumbered and believing that to be a destructive, unreasonable attitude, I decided to leave.

In two ways I see this as a failure of rhetoric. First, I was not able to convince them of my position. I knew what I believed, and I still believe the organization I was in would have gotten better results from my methods, but I wasn't able to reach the rest of the leadership. Second, the Tea Party itself has done a very poor job of persuading America of its positions, and its poor use of rhetoric has made it easy for the statist media to label it extremist, and even conservatives who should be sympathetic to attack it.

Since then, I have begun to appreciate the value of rhetoric, as Aristotle conceived of it. Aristotle sees the skilled rhetorician as someone who, in any given situation, knows what would be persuasive. Like the exercise of military power, the exercise of political power depends on momentum. The important thing is to get a mass of people, all at roughly the same time, who support your goals enough to give you power (money, work, votes, etc.), not the purity of that mass's beliefs. In order to build momentum, you need to persuade disparate groups of people that they would rather support your movement over any other that they might have sympathies with. Skill in rhetoric is essential for that.

Aristotle believed that the best use of rhetoric was to persuade people with the truth. A number of other ancient Greeks had written about rhetoric, but Aristotle linked it to logic and dialectic by proposing the enthymeme, a form of syllogistic reasoning, as the basis of rhetoric. A popular audience could not be expected to follow a long train of logical or dialectical reasoning, so the enthymeme was a simpler, looser form of logic. For that reason, some look down on the enthymeme -- it accepts conclusions that a stricter logic would not. But the questions of society are often not amenable to strict logic: there are too many unknowns, or there simply are no accepted truths about a topic from which to form a first premise. It is in these gray areas where the strictest logic cannot get very far that rhetoric can be quite useful.

The main objection to adjusting the Tea Party's rhetoric as well as to compromising with leftist groups is lack of trust. The reason the Tea Party became a necessity in the first place is a long series of betrayals by allegedly conservative politicians. This is a valid point, but I believe the answer is in honesty, not a demand for ideological purity. A rhetorically sophisticated Tea Party could have been, and could still be, much more influential than it is without compromising its ideals. I think the key to that is to be completely honest with everyone all the time about what the movement and its leadership are doing.

Instead of having a hidden agenda, like the left, the Tea Party should declare its goals openly, and then work toward achieving them in stages. Sometimes that might mean allying with political opponents in order to achieve a small step forward. The way to do that and not be a sell-out or look like one is to be honest about what is going on, put it all up on the net, and be willing to walk away from alliances that do not advance the goals. When the rank and file ask, 'why are we working with those dirtbags in the Occupy movement?', the leadership can honestly reply with the specific, previously stated goal they are working together to achieve, why the temporary alliance is valuable, and of course by pointing out that the alliance is temporary: as soon as we achieve X, we'll go back to fighting them. There are times in war when two mortal enemies agree to a cease-fire, a prisoner exchange, or another form of cooperation that benefits both sides. If the Tea Party insists that such a thing is treason, then it has chosen to be of very limited effect, and very possibly part of the problem.

Being part of the solution doesn't mean picking your hill to die on, not for an American. Our way is to let the other side die for their beliefs, whether literally or figuratively. Our way is to win, and winning requires effectiveness. In politics, that means getting good at rhetoric and compromise. Right now the Tea Party is telling the truth in angry, ugly ways that isolate it and strip it of effectiveness. It is essential for them to learn to tell the truth persuasively in a way that invites outsiders join in, a way that builds momentum, a way that actually has a chance of saving this republic.

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.