Putin's real problem

As Paul Rahe notes at Ricochet, Putin understands very well that the only people facing any real threat from the President of the U.S. are his domestic enemies:

Russia does not now have the means by which to pursue [its global ambitions], and it is not going to acquire the requisite means. . . . Russia is a banana republic with nuclear weapons.  Economically, it is almost as dependent on resource extraction as Saudi Arabia, and the pertinent resource is slowly being depleted. . . .  At the same time, Putin's Russia is ignoring the only strategic threat it faces.  The United States is not Russia's enemy.  It is not even a rival.  We once had an interest in containing and dismembering the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.  We have no interest in further reducing Russia's extent; and, insofar as we see Russia as a potential trading partner, our interest lies in Russian economic development.  The same can be said even more emphatically for Germany, France, Britain, and the other countries in Europe. 

There is, however, one country with an imperial past and a renewed craving for empire that has territorial ambitions which make of it a threat to Russia, and that country is China.

The Smart Ones

Well, they had the right institutional ties, anyway.

Palin said [during the 2008 election campaign]:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.

But never fear such indecision now! The President has declared that "there will be costs" if Russia invades the Ukraine. For example, they may have to pay to fuel their tanks and trucks.

Friday Night AMV

Prop-punk?



I thought there was a subtext about WWII in this; pretty much ends up the same way, although there is also a nod to E. R. Eddison.  In any case, you should always have a wingman.

"Don't make me come back there"

Thirteen years ago,  Jonathan Rauch wrote about his creed of "soft communitarianism," an alternative to both the most anarchic forms of libertarianism and the bureaucratic formalism that is strangling our country:

In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life."  Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy.  Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive. 

To [radical gay activist Michael] Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive.  Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. . . .  In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives. . . . 

I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things.  They are not.  A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says.  In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive.  Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not:  that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives.  Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors.  Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.   The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults.  But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual.  What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like?  How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave? 

THE fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms?

Rauch favors a rejection of mindless, intrusive zero-tolerance legalism that he variously calls the Hidden Law, genteel hypocrisy, tacit decency codes, and a determination to avert the public eye from anything that's not scaring the horses.  What this approach lacks in logical consistency it makes up for in humane effect:

Without Hidden Law, life in society becomes like the home life of a 15-year-old boy whose parents never stop shouting, "Billy! What are you doing in there?"

Rauch poses interesting questions on soft communitarianism and gay marriage:

Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong.  This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option.  It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it.  But this is wrong.  Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction."  Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged.  Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law.  It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society:  The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred. 

Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals.  I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals.  And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage.  When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals.  "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage."  Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.

Parallel universes

Megan Kelly demolishes HHS Sec'y Sibelius.  Warning:  your President feels aggrieved that you might get information from this source.



Watching Hagan slip and slide is fun, but the really good stuff is towards the end.  And Kelly's guest is absolutely right:  everyone watching only the news outlets the President would prefer we watched will agree totally with Sebelius's version of events, not to mention with Harry Reid's.

Chivalry on Steel

Maybe you can do it without the horse.

Rolling

It's a good idea to question what you see on the Internet. Maybe.

Elephants as Natural Slaves

This post is mostly for Cassandra's enjoyment, because she'll like the article, but I'll take a moment to answer the question the authors ask in the tagline:

"We now have solid evidence that elephants are some of the most intelligent, social and empathic animals around—so how can we justify keeping them in captivity?"

Well, we can justify it precisely because of their limited access to reason. In the Politics, Aristotle suggests that some men are slaves by nature. Specifically, those who "are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned."

What he means by "for them it is better" is that the slaves themselves will enjoy better results if their affairs are managed for them, i.e., if they are not left to their own devices. This should be an improvement that they themselves could recognize, rather than one that comes from outside of them (i.e., not "I think you would be better off if you lived as I want," but rather, "I realize that, though I'd prefer to do heroin every day, and would choose it if I were left free, it really would be better if I weren't free to make that choice").

Because they have enough reason to see the good, but not to choose it, there is a kind of objective justice to organizing their lives for them. This is true even if they don't choose this state, because it's the ability to choose to do what they can see would be better that is at work. Thus, if a judge should involuntarily commit an addict, the addict may be angry about it, and certainly wouldn't have chosen commitment for himself. But he should be able to see the justice of it, to recognize that in an objective way he will be better off for it.

So it is possible to justify the captivity of elephants in the same way. Note, though, that the force of Aristotle's assertion that there is a kind of just and natural slavery is to bracket it as the only acceptable kind. It turns out to be a harsh criticism of every kind of actual slavery being practiced in his own day.

We might apply a similar critique to our favorite zoo.

Republic VIII

An excerpt, for Tom but also for Cassandra, from Plato's great work on politics. But for one line, it sounds like something she has been saying to me for years. How many of these markers do you see around you?

“Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain[.] ... Liberty.... is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”

“How?” he said.

“Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.... [T]hose who obey the rulers... it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught.... Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?”

“Of course.”

“And this anarchical temper,” said I, “my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.”

“Just what do we mean by that?” he said.

“Why,” I said, “the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.” ...

“The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young... for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.”

“By all means,” he said. “And the climax of popular liberty, my friend,” I said, “is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.” ...

“And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them.” “I know it very well,” said he.

“This, then, my friend,” said I, “is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.”

Peer review

It ain't what it used to be.  Even the laziest and shallowest reviewer should have known there was something wrong with a paper entitled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce," whose abstract states that the authors "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact."

Jokes (Not For Dummies)

The authors of this piece assert that you won't get these jokes. I assume they know their audience. As for you ladies and gentlemen, I believe you will collectively get all of them, and individually nearly all.

Stoicism for Dummies

This brief article omits everything except a few pieces of pragmatic advice, but at least that makes it useful. Separately, that it is right about the pragmatics might inspire someone to read more deeply into the underlying thought and history.

Contradictions in Liberalism

This is an outstanding essay, very much worth reading in full. None of you who spends time here will likely regret giving it your attention, as it touches on so many of our regular topics of conversation.

The "Liberalism" under attack is Liberalism proper: the whole thing, all the way back to Locke and Hobbes. Once I too thought of myself as a Classical Liberal: and small wonder if I was one, for so I was taught to be. It is the whole world of what we are taught about politics. The only alternatives you will get even in college are later ones, supposedly defeated: fascism and Marxism. You can think what you want, as long as you begin from liberal grounds and recognize only alternatives liberalism itself has provoked.

The article defends the proposition -- quite right, I believe, though it will be challenging to some -- that Classical Liberalism and the current 'liberalism' are not inversions of each other as they are often said to be. The newer one is a natural consequence of the older one. Both must be rejected.

This is because both depend on an inheritance that is not being replenished, the author argues, and have created a world that cannot be sustained. What, then, is to be done?

(H/t: D29)

A Bright Spot on a Dark Sea

Ukraine has a revolution.

The protests have been driven by a faction that wants to push away from the domination of Russia, and pursue ties with the EU. They are culturally European, so much so that their symbols in the streets have been shields painted with Crusader crosses. Apparently inspired by these examples, other protesters went so far as to erect a trebuchet so as to provide artillery support to their lines.

Now we will see how far the Russians are prepared to go to support their client. In the past, they have been willing to go very far indeed. I can only wish the best to those resisting Russian domination in what seems to be an honest cause.

Meanwhile in Venezuela...

...it sounds like Ragnarok came early.

Don't Forget: Ragnarok Starts Tomorrow

The countdown clock at the JORVIK Viking Center is under 20 hours at this writing. Hope you're prepared -- just in case.

Turnpike Troubadours

Good red dirt country, and they put on a great show, if you can catch them.

Here's three of theirs I like, though I haven't found any I didn't like yet. (Yeah, the first two are from the same album, so the video starts w/ the same cover.)

Update: Two of my favorite country bands got together without telling me ... I'm hurt. (And YouTube won't let me embed it for some reason.)

Checking In On Queensland

Remember when we were talking about the new Aussie laws against bikers? Groups declared to be "gangs" by government fiat could no longer hire plumbers, because any plumber who worked with them would have his license pulled. Queensland has started making noises about pushing that concept on lawyers, too. After all, lawyers have licenses that can be pulled, and too many lawyers have been willing to side against the government by defending people charged under these laws:

Not content with upsetting the blue-collar workforce, Queensland premier Campbell Newman labelled members of the legal fraternity involved in defending bikies as:

…part of the machine, part of the criminal gang machine.

Turns out these lawyers are real bad apples.

Mr Newman shocked the legal community last week when he labelled lawyers who represented bikies as “hired guns”.

“They take money from people who sell drugs to our teenagers and young people. Yes, everybody’s got a right to be defended under the law, but you’ve got to see that for what it is,” he said.

“They are part of the criminal gang machine and they will see, say and do anything to defend their clients and try and get them off, or indeed progress their sort of case, their dishonest case.”

What about the plumbers, though? Can the plumbers hire lawyers without being 'part of the criminal gang machine'?

And, by the way, if you could prove these were criminal gangs, why wouldn't you just do that without going after their lawyers and plumbers?

Friday Night AMV

Police. State.

Cyborgs. Robots. Computer surveillance. Computer hacking. Secret government security organization infighting. Amazing amounts of weaponry. Health Ministry Commandoes.

Failure

McArdle on how important it is to be able to learn to fail. Learning how to fail well is one of the secrets to success. I've failed at very many things, over the years. If you're not failing, you're not really pushing yourself. You're not growing. You're not learning important lessons about how to bounce back when -- as is inevitable -- you do hit a wall you can't get over. She's quite right about all this.

No one will listen, of course, because the stakes are too high. It isn't just colleges that think this way, because these markers of perfection aren't really about accomplishment but about obedience to the expectations of your superiors. The Unfailing are reliable, not for the kind of entrepreneurs that McArdle is thinking of when she talks about the Dot-Coms, but for the big bureaucracies that dominate the centers of power in DC and New York.

Get on with one of those, and you're set for life. It won't matter that you've never learned to think for yourself, but only to parrot carefully what you've been told by your superiors is the right answer. That's just what they want you to do. Unfailingly.

An End To An Era

Did I miss the point at which Pravda bought out the Washington Post?

With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans.

Well, I mean, last year's projections do look a bit like austerity, if you're stone blind.

Obviously that kind of thing can't continue. I had some notion that the correction might run the other way, though.

Why Not The First?

What's so special about the First Amendment, anyway? The Tenth is treated as a dead letter. Why shouldn't the First be?

[U]nder the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission is planning to send government contractors into the nation's newsrooms to determine whether journalists are producing articles, television reports, Internet content, and commentary that meets the public's "critical information needs." Those "needs" will be defined by the administration, and news outlets that do not comply with the government's standards could face an uncertain future. It's hard to imagine a project more at odds with the First Amendment.

The initiative, known around the agency as "the CIN Study" (pronounced "sin"), is a bit of a mystery even to insiders. "This has never been put to an FCC vote, it was just announced," says Ajit Pai, one of the FCC's five commissioners (and one of its two Republicans).

That's funny, "sin." Everybody remember how that Alinsky book was formally dedicated to Lucifer? Ha, ha, ha. What a great joke.

Participation in the Critical Information Needs study is voluntary—in theory. Unlike the opinion surveys that Americans see on a daily basis and either answer or not, as they wish, the FCC's queries may be hard for the broadcasters to ignore. They would be out of business without an FCC license, which must be renewed every eight years.

Juggling with robots

This guy is having a blast.

Ted Cruz is winning

David Harsanyi on the debt ceiling cave:

As much as some of us are fans of “dysfunction,” tactically speaking, playing defense forever is no strategy.  Yes, the establishment works tirelessly within the political realities of the day.  Cruz, it seems, is more interested in changing the reality of his situation.  Forcing a 60-vote threshold on the debt ceiling wasn’t only about the debt ceiling (which Cruz surely understood would be hiked), and it wasn’t only about his presidential ambitions (which he surely has), but creating the type of problems for the GOP that will help bring a bunch of Matt Bevins into the Senate and solidify his position.

Gloating From Left Field

'Joe the Plumber' became famous in 2008 for questioning candidate Obama about how his higher taxes might disrupt those like himself who wanted to start small businesses. He managed to get the candidate to admit to something embarrassing, and as a result became the most hated man in America for a little while. It didn't change the election, and Joe -- like millions of other Americans -- found the business climate poisoned against small business both by tax changes and, especially, by the unknowable costs of health care 'reform.'

So he invested his money in part-ownership of a gun store (which has to have been one of the savvier investments anyone has made in this endless bad economy), and went back to being a working man. Turns out he has a new job.

It's a union job. Now I've always been a supporter of unions myself, provided that they play fair with their members and don't go making monopolies out of themselves. I've seen firsthand how unions in Savannah helped people from the working class, for whom advanced education was never an option, nevertheless climb into stable middle-class lives.

That's a good thing, and a job at Chrysler is honest work. Still, for a man who wanted to own his own business, it's kind of a fall to have to go back to working for somebody else.

If you follow the first link, you can read some pleased-with-themselves commentary about how lucky he is that the unions were there to help him find a job with good pay and benefits.

Well, sure.

But let's not forget that he has to look for a job with the unions precisely because he was right about candidate Obama. If the 2008 election had gone the other way, there'd be a lot more people who started small businesses -- and those good union jobs could go to some of our millions of unemployed. In fact, there would be more union jobs because all those small business owners and all their employees would be making money that could be used to buy cars.

I hope you enjoy the gloating, because it sure has been expensive.

There's A Little Cursing On This Video

In their defense, though, they can't possibly hear what they are saying.



More of the story at BLACKFIVE.

More happy economic news for flyover country

Occidental Petroleum spins off its California "assets" and moves its headquarters to Houston.  Something about wanting to be near places where people still conduct drilling operations.  And that pesky Perry is probably at it again.

John Kerry falls off turnip truck, gives interview

Hey!  It almost looks as if both Syria and Russia were operating in bad faith.  It's no wonder Kerry isn't getting what he wants, if that kind of unexpected development is going to keep sabotaging his strategies.

As Powerline notes:

I am starting to understand why so many liberals are isolationists.  If your foreign policy is going to be this bad, isolationism might well be a better alternative:  a variant on the medical injunction, “First, do no harm.”

More happy labor news for the South

Maybe New York really isn't for conservatives.

Monopolies

I asked earlier this week why VW couldn't listen to its employees in Chattanooga without establishing a union.  I started to notice a routine statement included in every story on the recent anti-union vote to the effect that "labor experts" agree it would be illegal to set up a works council without a union.

Hmm.  Now why would that be?  Do we need some kind of Protestant Reformation to establish the right of workers to speak directly to management without the intercession of a union and the sacrifice of 2-1/2 hours a month to pay for union dues?

A lot may depend on the name.  According to the N.Y. Times, "A works council is a committee, common at German factories, in which white-collar and blue-collar workers elect representatives who establish policies on issues like work hours, vacations and standards for firing workers."  Taken this way, a "works council" is a body with the power to lay down the law for workers.  Federal labor law prevents the establishment of such a body if it is "controlled" by management:

Many American labor experts say it would be illegal under federal law for a company to establish a works council unless workers first voted to have a union represent them.  Without that, a works council might be viewed as an illegal company-dominated, company-created employee group.

Apparently, however, there is such a thing as an "American-style works council," which "could be consulted only on some limited matters rather than negotiate with management on working conditions."   A pro-management labor expert explains:

[A]s long as any workforce body only "consults" with management, they may meet U.S. labor law but if they "deal" -- or negotiate -- with management then that would not be allowed.  "The test is whether they are exchanging ideas and proposals with management.  If they refrain from that, you will have a committee with diluted power, but more likely will be accepted" under U.S. labor law, he said.

According to Truth Out,

Works councils were established in Germany through a 1920 law, specifically as an alternative to the workers’ councils that had sprung up in many factories after World War I.   Workers attempted to take direct democratic control of the plants through the workers’ councils, on their way to a revolution that would take over the government.  That uprising was thwarted. 

The works councils, then, were the German government’s attempt at pacifying militant workers.  There were mass demonstrations by workers who opposed the works councils law, charging it would hinder workers’ independent organization.  Forty-two were killed by police and a state of emergency was declared, but the law went into effect. 

The works councils were abolished by the Nazis but reinstated after World War II under the military government of the United States and its allies.

The Washington Post interviewed Sen. Bob Corker (R.-Tenn.), who is no fan of the UAW:

"Our concern is not with the works council and never has been, and Volkswagen knows that very well.  U.S. labor relations and German relations are very different.  There's some question as to how a works council can be set up in the U.S., and there are various opinions on both sides of the spectrum, one says you have to have a union, one says you don't.  But we in no way have been negative relative to the works council.  It's really been the fact that the UAW would be the implementing entity.  We've even told Volkswagen that, 'why don't you guys create your own union within the plant, if you feel like that is something that is necessary to fully implement this in a way you see fit.'  I will say that BMW has implemented its works council without the UAW." 

Note:  BMW embraces a co-determination model, but has not responded to a request for clarification about whether or not it has a works council at its U.S facilities, nor was Corker's staff able to confirm the nature of employee-management relations there.  "If they do have a works council, it's illegal," says Thomas Kochan, Co-Director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research.  "You cannot have a company-sponsored union."

But according to a former NLRB member appointed by George H.W. Bush,

Volkswagen's Chattanooga employees can achieve all that a German-style labor board is set up to do without having to join a union. 

"Discussions over productivity, workplace safety, working conditions, we can have those discussions," said John Raudabaugh, who is now a labor law professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Fla. 

Raudabaugh, an NLRB member from 1990 to 1993 who later practiced in the Washington, D.C., office of the Nixon Peabody law firm, said VW employees and the company can "reach a win-win outcome without having to pay a third party" such as the United Auto Workers. 

However, a UAW official took issue with Raudabaugh, saying it is "universally recognized that you can't have a German-style effective works council system without a union to negotiate it." 

Gary Casteel, a UAW regional director in Lebanon, Tenn., said there is "no way under U.S. labor law" to set up such a labor board that could deal with substantive matters or have authority such as a union with the power to negotiate.  A works council, which could represent blue- and white-collar employees of a plant over issues such as hours or working conditions, is envisioned by the UAW in Chattanooga.  VW's Chattanooga plant could become the first auto factory in the U.S. to have such a German-style works council arrangement. 

Raudabaugh said the NLRB prohibits situations where employees and management engage in back and forth discussions to specifically reach a mutual agreement on wages and work conditions.  But, he said, companies don't need unions to talk to employees. 

"They can meet for free without paying a union," said Raudabaugh, who was appointed to the NLRB by former President George H.W. Bush.  "Employees should focus on using their money for their personal purposes."

Root causes

In a twist on the usual "root causes" argument, the Sultan of Knish argues that the left's welfare state and the right's police state are both attempts to treat symptoms rather than diseases:

The police escalation that shows up on countless videos exists because the people demanded it. And the people demanded it because liberal social policies made entire cities unlivable.  The militarized police forces out of cities like Los Angeles filtered down to the suburbs and the rural areas as the same policies and populations that made cities unlivable began spreading outward. 

The police state, associated with the right, worked in tandem with the social policies of the left, to dull the pain of those policies.  That "dulling" has become the new role of conservative politicians in America who manage the disaster instead of rolling it back.  The left realized that without the police state, its policies faced a much broader level of rejection so it learned to tolerate the pigs and the man.

Once Again, The World Confirms The Wisdom of Lewis Grizzard

A Kentucky pastor who starred in a reality show about snake-handling in church has died -- of a snakebite. Jamie Coots died Saturday evening after refusing to be treated, Middleborough police said.

Maybe you've heard the story.

I'm Rich!

One charitable organization, The Found Animals Foundation, is offering a $25 million award to the inventor of the first single-shot, nonsurgical sterilant that works in both dogs and cats.

Where do I pick up my check?

Overcharge

Time and again we see prosecutors charging suspects not with the crime that they, the prosecutors, can easily prove. Rather, they charge them with some inflated version of the crime in the hope of forcing a plea bargain. This is true especially if they can reach for a capital charge, because death-qualified juries convict at higher rates.

There is a huge problem with this that is widely understood, which is that it imposes an unfair cost on the accused -- who is still presumed innocent -- in seeking his or her fair trial. You should not have to run the risk of decades in prison or death just to go to trial. At trial you should face the charge that best represents the crime you're actually alleged to have committed, not the most serious variation that can be brought against you. The price for getting to be charged as you allegedly deserve shouldn't be accepting a guilty plea.

But the other problem, less often discussed, is that if you do go to trial the prosecution sometimes loses. This is because the inflated charge damages their credibility with the jury. The crime they could have easily persuaded the jury you had committed is now off the table; instead, they have to take the inflated charge and insist, with a straight face, that the facts support it. Juries often don't buy this, for the simple and excellent reason that it is not true.

Here we have a case where the government could have charged with second degree murder and walked away with an easy conviction. It obtained attempted second degree convictions for everyone else in the car. It could have obtained an actual second degree conviction for the youth actually killed.

Instead they went with the capital crime, and now they have a mistrial. Those for whom this was an open and shut case have one less reason to believe in the reliability of the courts. Those who see racism afflicting the system have one more argument in favor of their proposition that the system doesn't treat young black men fairly.

We see it over and over, but of course it will continue because it usually works. In part due to this systematic overcharging, more than 90% of criminal cases are plead.

Our system depends on it: we try far too many people for crimes to ever hope to give them all a day in court.

Seasons

Dave Morris, author of a number of successful 1980s titles for youth, writes about the coming of fantasy gamebooks:

It was the early 1980s, and children's publishers really didn't know what hit them. For decades they'd been turning out nice cozy books based on their mental picture of a short-trousered scamp with a cap gun in one hand and a bottle of ginger pop in the other. In fact, even that view may be too generous. Hardly a single children's editor was male, or under forty, and mostly I think all those nice ladies just wrote boys off as not wanting to read books. Their ideal reader was sweet, quiet and mild as milk. So, not really like most girls at the time either.

They got a rude awakening. Boys did want to read books, and tomboys too - just not the books the publishers had been churning out. They wanted blood, guts, gore, mayhem, violence, and gutsy action. And most of all they wanted to be the hero.

Any reason to think that a similar situation doesn't obtain today -- in not only children's literature, but young adult literature?

My usual preferred response is to say that there are plenty of wonderful titles for boys, they just are older. But being older, they are better! As indeed they are.

But these gamebooks serve a role as a gateway to reading, and a bridge to the older titles for children whose elders think of themselves as categorically different from the generations that came before. Why then read a 19th century redaction of a 15th century work? Why read chronicles of the Hundred Years War? Why even read about hobbits and Rangers?

Well, perhaps because you were introduced to them, and found yourself at home in their company.

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.