The Devil and the Harvard Lawyer

For some years now the "Amazon Chernobyl" has been an environmental cause célèbre. Texaco is alleged to have polluted the Ecuadorian Amazon and poisoned its indigenous inhabitants.  As the successor in interest to Texaco, Chevron has been sued for years by counsel representing 30,000 Amazonians, but asserts that Texaco cleaned up its own spill and left the country decades ago, while current pollution is the result of the later (and ongoing) shoddy operations of Ecuador's government-owned oil company.

The documentary film "Crude," directed by Joe Berlinger, wholeheartedly adopts the position of the indigenes, who are represented by New York's Harvard-trained plaintiff's lawyer Steven R. Donziger.   Admirers of "Crude" were thrilled when, several years ago, Donziger won an $18 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court.  Like the makers of "Crude," Wikipedia also wholeheartedly adopts Donziger's position, but today added an interesting offhand link to an unwelcome development:   a federal district court in New York handed down a 500-page judgment on Tuesday enjoining Donziger and others from profiting from enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment, including Donziger's expected $600 million share of the fee, on the ground of a RICO conspiracy to corrupt the Ecuadorian trial.

I've never read anything quite like the judgment, which details a long and lurid story in dispassionate and organized prose, detailing the many instances in which Donziger and his allies betrayed their troubled consciences:

Indeed, [wrote the court,] one Ecuadorian legal team member, in a moment of panicky candor, admitted that if documents exposing just part of what they had done were to come to light, “apart from destroying the proceeding, all of us, your attorneys, might go to jail.”

“Deal with Gustavo Pinto [Donziger wrote in his journal] – feel like I have gone over to the dark side.  First meeting like that I was not eaten alive.  Made modest offer, plus bonus.  Agreed to keep it between us, no written agreement.  Independent monitoring.”

The exposure feared by the whole team included a bewildering array of dirty tricks, including extortion and bribery, striking at the heart of the case against Chevron.  Supposedly independent experts were pressured to abandon analytical techniques that implicated the Ecuadorian government's drilling operations rather than the much earlier ones of Texaco; expert reports apparently were ghostwritten or even forged.

That this story can be told in any detail is a testament, not only to the power of unguarded (and incompetently encrypted) email communications, but to Donziger's insatiable desire for publicity:  it's the out-takes from the filming of "Crude" that put many of the nails in his coffin:

“[A]ll this bullsh*t about the law and facts but in the end of the day it is about brute force....” 

“[A]t the end of the day, this [i.e., the lack of evidence on a key point] is all for the Court just a bunch of smoke and mirrors and bullsh*t.  It really is.” 

Donziger doesn't seem to have considered the danger of letting the cameras roll during some of these frank discussions; he went so far as to reassure a member of Amazon Watch, who asked whether the film clips might one day be subpoenaed, that it couldn't happen under Ecuadorian law.  (Pro conspirator's tip:  if one of you starts wondering if the video might be subpoenaed, stop conspiring until you've turned off the camera.)

The New York federal judge concludes there's little doubt that Donziger orchestrated a RICO conspiracy that included a $500,000 bribe to the Ecuadorian judge--though that's really only a minor part of the extended corruption.  (It's actually hard to keep track of the Ecuadorian judges in the case, so many of them having been removed from office for corruption or by naked political fiat.  Towards the end of the New York judgment is a lengthy and dispiriting account of the collapse of the Ecuadorian justice system at the hands of President Correa.)

Donziger is an interesting man.   He attended Harvard law school not only with Barack Obama, his sometime hoops-shooting buddy, but with the grandson of a former Ecuadorian president, who got him interested in a brewing scandal over oil operations in the Amazon.  Donziger quickly got an accurate grip on the realpolitik of the Ecuadorian justice system in the 21st century, concluding that justice had almost nothing to do with it and politics was everything.   People give that rap to the U.S. system, too, without any genuine understanding of the very minor degree to which it's true here, in comparison with the thorough-going truth of the accusation in Central and South America.

What's remarkable about Donziger is that he kept a diary, that he didn't destroy it, and that he allowed it to be produced to an honest court:

Donziger viewed the Ecuadorian courts as corrupt, weak and responsive to pressure – as institutions that, at best, “make decisions based on who they fear the most, not based on what the laws should dictate.”  In a particularly revealing comment, made in his personal notebook, he wrote that “the only way the court will respect us is if they fear us – and that the only way they will fear us is if they think we have . . . control over their careers, their jobs, their reputations – that is to say, their ability to earn a livelihood.”

That and, of course, the fact that he allowed a fawning documentary film crew to follow him around and record his frank and off-the-cuff descriptions of his own cheerful collaboration in a corrupt system.  

To tell the truth, I'm a little impressed that Donziger maintained as much internal integrity as he seems to have done: he was clearly aware of when he "went over to the dark side."   A truly corrupt man would have lied to himself more, and avoided leaving so many of his own fingerprints on the critical decisions.   Donziger doesn't seem to have put any serious effort into setting up a scapegoat to take the fall for him.  It's even possible that he believes to this day that he was on the side of the angels, ready to use any weapon necessary to get "justice" for the Ecuadorian Amazon peoples.

I have to wonder, though, whether he cares enough to try to make a fair determination of who caused whatever pollution they are now suffering from. It is the besetting sin of a plaintiff's lawyer (and many crusaders for social justice) to care only who has the deepest pockets to ameliorate the victims' financial and social burdens.  Donziger may even believe that the real purpose of his expected $600 million fee was to finance his future heroic escapades:

“Yeah, but, that is evidence. . . .  Hold on a second, you know, this is Ecuador, okay . . . . You can say whatever you want and at the end of the day, there’s a thousand people around the courthouse, you’re going to get what you want.  Sorry, but it’s true. . . .  Okay.  Therefore, if we take our existing evidence on groundwater contamination which admittedly is right below the source . . . .  And wanted to extrapolate based on nothing other than, our, um, theory that it is, they all, we average out to going 300 meters in a radius, depending on the . . . gradient.  We can do it.  We can do it.  And we can get money for it. . . .   And if we had no more money to do more work, we would do that.   You know what I’m saying? . . .  And it wouldn’t really matter that much. . . .  Because at the end of the day, this is all for the Court just a bunch of smoke and mirrors and bullsh*t.   It really is.  We have enough, to get money, to win.”

And yet a coverup of the culpability of the Ecuadorian government's drilling agency in favor of sticking the liability to deep-pocketed Chevron, the successor to a company that may well have entirely remediated the only spill it ever caused, only ensures that whatever pollution is now affecting living, breathing Amazonian residents will not be stopped.

IRS Mafia

I assume this is a ploy, but it's an interesting one.

Because apparently when I'm home alone, I cook and blog

So, sadly, the last of my chili was consumed for lunch today.  Knowing I could make due with eggs, bread, cereal and PB&N (peanut butter and nutella) sandwiches, I decided that I wanted to finally try something I've always wanted to.  I tried to make a Thai inspired chili.

This is actually more risky and complicated than anything I've tried before.  Not because the prep work was hard, nor the cooking, but because I had zero idea how it would turn out.  My greatest fear was it would be inedible, and I'd need to throw out a bunch of food.  Wastefulness is a sin (or so I was taught), so that was a real concern for me.  But I'm pleased to say, so far it seems like this might work.  Here's what I did.

1.25 lbs chicken breast cubed
28 oz peanut butter
20 oz diced tomatoes
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
16 oz hot salsa
2 dried red chili peppers
4 habanero peppers
3 scotch bonnet peppers
8 tablespoons soy sauce
7 tablespoons sriracha sauce
5 tablespoons hoisin sauce
3 tablspoons chili powder

Mostly cook the chicken in a skillet and throw it into a crockpot.  Dice all the plants (I used a little food processor for this), toss that in.  Pour in the peanut butter, tomatoes, salsa, and sauces.  Stir well, put on low and let it go.  That's it.

It's been cooking for about 2-3 hours so far and I tasted it.  I like it.  It might be a little too peanuty, but I don't consider that a bad thing personally.  I haven't eaten any of the meat yet, because I want to make sure it's all fully cooked first, but I think this is going to turn out pretty well.  Now, I don't know that this is something that is going to be eaten straight from a bowl like my other chili, but after cooking down some, it might; I'm not yet sure.  What I PLAN on doing, is cooking some rice noodles, spooning the chili on top, and throw some bean sprouts in there for each serving.

How's it taste?  Sweet, savory, spicy for sure (but strangely all front loaded with little afterburn).  I'll update as I learn more.

Queensland Madness Continues

I realize none of you reside in Queensland, and so you may be wondering why I keep drawing your attention to the place. The reason is partially that it is a shocking example of how quickly the ancient liberties can be lost.

Of course, it's only tyranny for a few, for now: those who are thought to be enemies of the state. And anyone who knows them.

Previous installments have covered the suspension of licenses for tradesmen who continued to work with motorcycle clubs deemed -- via no due process, but simple government declaration -- to be outlaw clubs. Then we saw some initial moves to strip these clubs and their members of legal protections, via a campaign to paint lawyers who defend them in court as members of the "criminal conspiracy," so that they might lose their law licenses as well.

Now, we see that "tradies" who lose their licenses because of alleged ties to "bikies" will not be told why their license was pulled. They will have no capacity to challenge the claims in court, or even to know the details of the accusations.

From July, plumbers, builders and electricians have to resign their gang membership and associations with bikies or face automatic deregistration.

Police have already begun compiling secret "criminal intelligence" files on tradesmen with suspected links to the 26 gangs outlawed last year.

But under the laws, the tradesmen and their lawyers will be prevented from hearing or testing the police allegations of their bikie links that are given to regulators or in closed hearings for workers' appeals.

Civil libertarians and the unions have condemned the police secrecy, saying that even suspected terrorists were allowed the right to have their lawyers present and challenge allegations at closed hearings relating to national security.

So much is being washed away, so very fast.

How Americans Breakfast

As seen from Europe.

Fear and loathing in the shopping aisle

Everyone's favorite meddler, Michelle Obama, announces improvements in nutritional labeling:

“So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product?” she said. 

Saying hapless moms want to do the right thing, Obama suggested many give up in defeat because they can’t decipher current nutritional labels without “a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope or a degree in nutrition.”

That's a solution right there:  government subsidies for nutrition school tuition for all hapless moms.

We run into these shoppers all the time.  They're vapor-locked, cart adrift in the maximum traffic-blocking configuration, gazing slack-jawed at the shelves.  They're clearly violating the "find it, kill it, drag it out of the store" shopping mandate of civilized people.

The only possible solution is to replace labels with EZ-to-follow instructions:  "Eat this," or "Do not eat this."  Or maybe we can just have the government ship healthy, nutritious, approved food in pre-measured packets to each home.  And then require a license for home cooking.  You can never tell what people might put in their food if they're given free rein.  There are children in those homes, you know, and besides, we'll be the ones paying their medical bills.

The Tea Party and Aristotle's Rhetoric, Part 2: The Three Means of Persuasion

This series is both an exploration of the Tea Party and of Aristotle's rhetoric, so feel free to comment on either. Please don't feel that you need to discuss the topic through Aristotle.

In Part 1, I explained why I thought the Tea Party had been weakened by a failure to understand and use rhetoric skillfully. As a way of exploring this, and how to correct it, I used Christof Rapp's SEP article, Aristotle's Rhetoric. The main points from that post and the resulting discussion are that Aristotle believed the best use of rhetoric was to persuade people with the truth, that a form of syllogistic reasoning called the enthymeme was an excellent way to do that, and that the Tea Party needs to find common ground with the public and other movements from which to begin pursuing their goals. In Part 2, I will begin exploring the technical aspects of rhetoric and how the Tea Party could improve.

Aristotle's Rhetoric claims that there are three technical means of persuasion. That is, these means depend on a method, and the method depends on knowing what is and isn't persuasive. In addition, 'technical' implies that these are things provided by the speaker, not pre-existing conditions.

These technical means are "(a) in the character of the speaker, or (b) the emotional state of the hearer, or c) in the argument (logos) itself." The speaker wants to seem credible by displaying practical intelligence, a virtuous character, and good will, all in his speech. Emotions can change our judgments, so the speaker must arouse the hearers' emotions, and to do that he must have a good understanding of human emotion. Finally, the speaker should demonstrate to the audience what the situation is, persuading by argument.

Of the three, Aristotle emphasizes the argument, and he gives two methods for it. Induction works from particulars to a universal, using examples. Deduction works from things already believed to something different being necessarily true because of those presuppositions. In rhetoric, deduction uses the enthymeme, a form of syllogism, but one in which, because we lack complete knowledge, is of necessity somewhat less formal than the logical syllogism. Typically, they take the form of 'if - then' or causal 'since' or 'for' clauses.

E.g., 'If X is the case, we should do Y,' or 'since X is the case, ...' or 'X is the case, for Y results in X and we know Y is true.'

From this discussion, it seems to me that the Tea Party could do better in all three technical areas. One problem with coming to grips with the problem, however, is that everything the Tea Party says or does is distorted by the lefty media (i.e., most mainstream media). For example, the media and the Tea Party's political opponents (but I repeat myself) have done a good job of character assassination, so has the Tea Party failed to do what it could to establish its good character, or has its massive opposition simply outshouted it? It's hard to say, but I certainly think the Tea Party could do a better job with all three techniques.

Probably the Tea Party's single biggest rhetorical failure is in understanding the emotional state of the audience. Actually, I believe the Tea Party has seriously erred in understanding who the audience is. The proper audience is that great middle of the electorate who are not already politically opposed and who could be persuaded. Too often, Tea Partiers publicly speak as if they are talking to other Tea Partiers or to their acknowledged political opponents. This is why, I think, their rhetoric is too often extreme: they are stoking the fires of the base, or they are attacking their enemies. There's a time and place for both of those, but mostly the Tea Party needs to understand those who are unaligned and persuadable and adjust their rhetoric to persuade them. Those are the emotions it is important to understand and work with.

Meetings

If there's a loner scale, I must score about 97 on it.  That's not to say I don't need human contact (beyond my husband), because I certainly do--just not very often.  When I do get it, there's one form I can barely tolerate:  the Meeting.  Need me to rub shoulders with crowds to get a job done?  No real problem, as long as it's not a daily thing.  Recently I've become what the Episcopal Church calls a "lay eucharistic minister," otherwise known as either a lay reader or a chalice bearer, who reads part of the daily lessons or prayers during Sunday services and helps administer the sacramental wine.  That's a sort of human contact I enjoy very much.  Want to gather in large numbers to produce music?  Great!  My other favorite sort of gathering is the barn-raising variety:  there's a big task to get done, and large numbers of people to work in joint harness until it's finished.  I quite enjoy a quarterly meeting of the local Woman's Club to pick up trash along the roadside.

Where I draw the line is a gathering of humans to follow some kind of vague agenda and stumble through a drawn-out process of reaching decisions (or, more often, not managing to reach any).  Those make me homicidal.  Law firms are very much given to them, especially the sort that drag on all day long to no apparent purpose.  In recent years, I've ruthlessly pruned back on social activities that give people a right to expect me to attend meetings.

So it was with real chagrin that I read an email from my county Republican party chairman last night, casually explaining that, for obscure reasons involving the security of the documentation for Tuesday's primary election,  I would be required to hang around until the post-election precinct convention is concluded.  After thirteen hours of manning the polls.  I do not think so.  I think I have an alternative solution, which will not violate any state election laws.  If I'm mistaken, and catch any flack for it, it may turn out that I'm going to be out of town for any future primary elections.

Unexpectedly

The conventional press gives the President his usual pass for not foreseeing the obvious.  The American Interest explores the curiously blind smugness:

We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media.  Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box.  How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do?  Well bred and well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

As far as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political leadership these days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining table (unless they are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally reasonable people who see the world as we do, and are motivated by the same things that motivate us.  Many people are, of course, guided by an outlook not all that dissimilar from the standard upper middle class gentry American set of progressive ideas.  But some aren’t, and when worlds collide, trouble comes.

I'm skeptical of the value of pure diplomacy, but surely one thing it can do is ensure that we have a corps of people who have studied their corner of the world and learned something about how its inhabitants think. --OK, who am I kidding?  It's nothing new to make know-nothing political appointments to ambassadorships, but there still needs to be a solid base of professional staff who know something about their host countries instead of congratulating themselves and their masters that geopolitics are a relic of the barbarous past.

It was a great week in which to announce the proposed dismantling of the military.

H/t Ace.

The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago

Bachelor Week

So, I've been away from the Hall for a great while.  Mostly due to work picking up, but partly due to just falling out of the blog-reading habit.  Hopefully, posting now won't offend our kind host.

I find myself in an unusual position.  My wife is in the Virginia/DC area because her parents are in town from LA, and will be so for several days, and as my parents live in Richmond, it was a good opportunity for her to see all four of them.  But as I have to work, and someone must watch the cats, I am at home; a bachelor for the first time in a long while.  As I said, this is unusual for me, but presents me with a great opportunity.

For you see, while my wife is a wonderful lady with many fine qualities, she has one flaw.  She does not like spicy food.  I myself cannot get enough.  So I am making a crockpot of my award winning (winning a chili cook-off in the office counts, right?) Hellishly Hot Habanero Chili:

1.5 lbs spicy turkey sausage
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
1 30oz can diced tomatoes
1 pint sized jar hot salsa
2 cans Goya red kidney beans
4 heaping tablespoons chili powder
6 habanero peppers

Un-skin the sausage, dice half the onion and mince one clove of garlic. Brown the sausage with the diced onion and minced garlic, throw it into the crockpot. Dice the rest of the onion, mince the other two cloves of garlic, throw them in the crockpot. Pour in the tomatoes, beans, salsa, and chili powder. I de-seeded and minced the peppers (which probably cut down a lot on the spicy) and threw them in the crockpot. Put it on high heat for about four hours (till I went to bed) stirring occasionally. Low heat over night, and low heat until we ate it at lunchtime. You don't need to baby it.

That's the recipe as I made it for the contest.  It's not near as hot as you would expect.  So this time, and because only I will be eating it, I bumped everything up a notch.  More habaneros, I used Rotel hot tomatoes instead of normal diced tomatos, I used spicy chili beans instead of the red kidney beans, and I used a hotter sausage this time.  It's cooking now, and I am a happy happy man.

Just thought I'd share.

Environmental perspectives

Nice article about what it means to be an uncute animal with economic value to humans, or without economic value to humans.  The article includes this picture, which looks like something right out of The Matrix:

Horseshoe crabs' blood uses copper instead of iron.

H/t, as usual on Saturdays, to Rocket Science.

How to survive a night in your car

This kind of article is increasingly relevant in these days of global warm/cooling.  All of the advice sounds reasonable, but would there be any room left in the car for the driver, let alone passengers?

• Bottled water (at least four quarts) 
• Snack foods, particularly nutritious energy bars 
• Raisins, dried fruit, nuts, candy bars 
• Strike-anywhere, waterproof matches and small candles 
• A flashlight with extra batteries 
• First-aid kit 
• Folding knife and multi-tool 
• Emergency flares 
• An extra winter coat, mittens and a wool cap 
• Winter boots 
• Toilet paper 
• Cellphone and charger 
• A space blanket 
• A spare blanket or sleeping bag 
• A portable radio with spare batteries 
• Tow rope 
• Nylon cord 
• Flagging tape 
• Chemical hand and body warmer packets 
• Jumper cables 
• A small shovel 
• Tire chains 
• Rock salt, sand or kitty litter to provide added traction when stuck on a slick surface.

DL Sly, you live in a challenging climate. What do you carry around in your truck?

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.