The $10K degree

Texas Governor Rick Perry is enjoying more irritating success with his troglodyte philosophy:

[W]ith his 2011 state of the state address, . . . Perry challenged Texas's public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10,000 in tuition, fees, and books, and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency. 

The idea met with skepticism. . . . Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, posed the rhetorical question: "Do you really want a stripped-down, bare-bones degree?" .  .  . 

If these reactions suggested Perry was out of step with the higher-education establishment, the public's reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers. Baselice and Associates conducted a public-opinion survey commissioned by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently.  Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost.

Now that the program is solidly launched, showing some success, and being emulated in other states, critics fume that the degrees are substandard "applied science" affairs, as if that were a bad thing. Myself, I look forward to the trend gaining traction in a broader field of academia. My own college degree would have cost about $10K if my folks had had to pay cash (instead, it was a perk that reflected in part my father's modest salary). Admittedly, it was a diffuse liberal-arts kind of degree that left me ill-prepared to earn a living, but it got me into law school, where my subsequent degree cost only a few hundred dollars for each of three years, being, presumably, heavily subsidized by the backward state of Texas. Once I had that one, it was no problem earning a living.

It's true that this was thirty years ago and that there has been inflation since then, but inflation doesn't account for a 440% increase in tuition over the last quarter century, and anyway my university was expensive in comparison with state schools, even if it was a bargain next to the Ivy League. Nor am I persuaded that today's youth are receiving fabulous educations that are 4-1/2 times as valuable as my cut-rate affair, either from an intrinsic point or view or in terms of being able to get and stay employed.  Wherever the extra money is going, it's not making the difference between a good education and a "stripped-down degree."

As for where tomorrow's students are going to receive their essential political indoctrination, well, if the public primary education complex and the media can't find some way to pull that off, then there must be some progressive foundations that can cough up the necessary funding.

On a related subject, I'm enjoying Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World," about Finland's astounding success in catapulting its education success to the top of the world in only a few years. Did they do it by spending a bunch of money? Did their kids suddenly get smarter? Did they implement more and better tests and national curricula?  No, they started hiring teachers only out of the top quarter or so of their classes, then gave them a lot of autonomy. Magic.

Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right

An article about driving a Sriracha factory out of California and into the arms of Texas mentioned a book called "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right," about the success of the Texas small-government model, which was surprising for two reasons.  First, it's written by Erica Grieder, who is identified as a "senior editor" at Texas Monthly, and I didn't think those people were allowed to entertain suspect political or socio-economic philosophy.  Second, my husband points out that it's on our shelf, where it's sat since he bought it some time ago, though neither of us has read it.  Another book to add to my pile!

A third reason for surprise, of course, is that the author uses the serial comma (a/k/a the Oxford or Harvard comma) in her title.  I'm a serial comma type myself, from way back, but in a decided minority.

In the linked article, Grieder addresses the familiar divide between libertarian and social conservatives in Texas politics, an issue of inexhaustible interest for me.

Somebody didn't get the memo

Intrepid researchers charged the feds $500,000 for an analysis of cellulosic-biofuel production and concluded that it's a net loss from the point of view of the carbon footprint.  Cellulosic biofuel is produced from corn husks rather than corn kernels, and has been favored for its lighter impact on the food supply, especially in the wake of the global food shortages that were attributed to biofuel agriculture a few years ago.  Unfortunately, the new study concluded that removing all the husks and converting them to fuel only exacerbates the problem of failing to re-sequester the carbon in the soil.  It's not great for the soil quality, either.

Quite a spectacle.  Somewhere, someone's pounding his desk and demanding to know whose idea it was to let a bunch of researchers go out there and follow their professional consciences.  Now we have a study that shows that cellulosic biofuels don't decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide.  They also degrade the soil and cost taxpayers a bundle, so they wouldn't make that much sense even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were credibly linked to inimical climate change, which it's not.  Somebody forgot to write a check and/or send an appropriate memo of instruction to the research team, which is no way to keep the science settled.

Worms!

Every year about this time, we get invaded by what we call "woolly worms," which I think are really tussock moth caterpillars:  either Orgyia leucostigma or Orgyia detrita.  The Internet tells me that some people call them "longhorn caterpillars," which makes sense, even if I've never heard it around here.

They arrive in huge numbers, covering every surface to a density of at least several per square foot. Although bug websites say they occasionally cause "defoliating events," we don't see much of that; the problem with cut-leaf ants is far worse.  The main problem is that you can't put a hand or foot anywhere without encountering them.  They don't sting, but their hairs do raise a mild allergic reaction in some people's skin.  The infestation lasts for several weeks.

Right behind them come the indigo buntings, which seem to enjoy eating them.  Lots of sightings right now of indigo buntings and red-breasted grosbeaks:

The indigo bunting is a real treat, because we don't have bluebirds or blue jays, so the bunting is just about it in the bright-blue department.

There is even the occasional remarkable painted bunting:

Some of these shouldn't be tried at home . . .

. . . even though they look like a lot of fun.

Easter morning

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.  I Cor. 15:26

Incompatible formats

I'm no spring chicken or cutting-edge technology adapter, but I seem like one next to my mother-in-law, who lacks a working computer or Internet connection.  She used to have one, but never really got the hang of it.  She's definitely not going to start now, when she's pushing 90.

Last night, Megyn Kelly of Fox News played a clip from a viral YouTube video featuring a wedding in which the Irish tenor priest Fr. Ray Kelly sings a so-so version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."  This excellent song had been covered by all kinds of artists for years, and used in the movie "Shrek," before contemporary churches got hold of it and started incorporating it in services--after ditching the original, interesting lyrics and replacing them with anodyne sentiments framing the essential chorus of "Hallelujah."

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift:
The baffled king composing Hallelujah. 

Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair,
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah. 

Baby I've been here before,
I know this room, I've walked this floor;
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch;
Love is not a victory march,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah. 

There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below,
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you?
The holy dove was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah. 

Maybe there’s a God above,
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
It’s not a cry you can hear at night;
It’s not somebody who has seen the light;
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah. 

You say I took the name in vain.
I don't even know the name,
But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn't matter which you heard;
The holy or the broken Hallelujah. 

I did my best, it wasn't much.
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch.
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Does my mother-in-law want a nice, easy CD with a copy of one of the good covers of this song that are available commercially?  No, she likes Father Kelly's voice on the wedding video.  (So does everyone; the YouTube video has gotten 30 million hits in a few days.)  Probably she also gets a kick out of the unexpected sight of a priest breaking into song from the altar, and the delighted couple smiling shyly.  Sigh.  There's no question that we'll do whatever it takes to provide her with this small pleasure; she's ill and in constant discomfort these days.  But it turns out to be unexpectedly complicated to put a YouTube video into a format that one's TV can play, because absolutely no one does that any more.

This site offers advice about two separate pieces of freeware, one to download the video and another to burn the DVD.  The very first comment notes that the freeware doesn't work, but recommends two other programs that do.  Succeeding comments complain that the second recommendations bristle with malware; others disagree; and others point out that they don't work on Macs.

It would almost be easier to buy her a computer and an Internet connection, but it's all she can do to operate the TV, so that's not in the cards.  I'm hoping some of you will know better than I how to pull this off.  Or that, in the meantime, my delightful husband figures it out.  I can hear him cussing in the other room right now.

What we do

My Holy Week reading has included that old standby, "The Screwtape Letters."  The senior tempter Screwtape explains to his feckless nephew that the "Enemy" wants men to be concerned with what they do, while the tempter should try to distract his subject with what will happen to him.

All our recent talk about insurrection brought to mind this clip from the fine movie "Matewan."  Most of the townspeople were uneasily watching an eviction, thinking about what was happening to them and their neighbors.  The sheriff thinks about what he will do.



Holy Saturday is Jailbreak Day.  The suffering of the Crucifixion is over.  Christ has descended into Hell, opened all the cell doors, and showed everyone the way out.  "Follow Me," He says.  "You know how to put one foot in front of the other."  It's about what we do, not what happens to us.

The Brian Battle

A thousand years ago, Brian Boru died at the Battle of Clontarf. For a long time Irish historians taught Clontarf as the victory by which the Irish freed themselves from the Vikings (as, this being the real point of the lesson for their students, one might hope the Irish might someday free themselves from a more recent ship-borne foreign invader). Thus Brian Boru was a major historical figure in Ireland, a patriotic icon of significant standing.

In fact, of course, there were nearly as many Vikings on Boru's side as against him. What he was really doing was entering into Viking politics, with the result that an alliance was formed that improved outcomes for his side. The Irish were more important, and better off, but they didn't push the Vikings into the sea.

Nevertheless, he was a revolutionary figure. Before him the Ui Neill -- the family, that is, of the same Neil of the Nine Hostages who once enslaved Saint Patrick -- had dominated the High Kingship of Ireland. After him comes one of the most famous family names in Ireland: the O'Brians.

"Sequestration Babies"

Children are gifts from God, but this time it appears that the inability of Congress to craft a budget may have had some influence.

Friday Night AMV

Teenager.
Secret talisman.
Giant robot.
Sidekicks.
Villans.
Pretty teenage girl to rescue.
More giant robots.

You can never have enough giant robots.

Disparate petards

It would take a heart of stone not to chuckle at the White House's recent squirming over the results of having "disparate impact" reasoning used against them in re their practice of underpaying female staffers.  Now the same amusing spectacle is playing itself out in a lawsuit by the EEOC against Kaplan, Inc., the private test-prep and for-profit education company.  The Sixth Circuit recently poured out the EEOC's complaint that Kaplan was using the same background checks on prospective employees that the EEOC itself uses.  The EEOC had argued that criminal record and credit checks had a disparate impact on minority applicants.

Can you imagine Kaplan trying to defend itself against a suit by customers whose financial information was stolen by Kaplan employees with access to their student loan records?  "Yes, we could have run routine background checks, but that might have been unfair to minority applicants."  How can anyone even argue with a straight face that it's racially discriminatory to consider criminal and credit records for prospective employees?  What mental gymnastics are required to ignore the implications of that assumption?

More from Steyn

It does seem like the Right spends a lot of time worrying about whether the individual involved in the case is really the right kind of guy, really respectable and really just our sort. The Left doesn't do this, which is probably why they win a lot more of these fights. As Steyn points out, though, it's getting to be common enough that they can't all be bad apples.

These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:

* In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’

* In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

* At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

* In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

* In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

* And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.

The question, at some point, ceases to be about the merits of the individual case, or whether we do or do not care for the individual in conflict with the government. The first people to come into conflict with an increasingly oppressive system will be the most pricklish, and often we don't care for the pricklish. What we call the 'merits,' though, are about the law as it stands. If the system is the problem, the law that the system interprets is untrustworthy as a guide.

For now it's the pricklish, or the outlandish, or the self-righteous. Or maybe it's the self-described outlaws. But increasingly, it's all of us. If we're going to have to fight, why wait until there are fewer of us left?

Nice Work, NYT: "Veterans and White Supremacy"

Don't you folks ever worry that if you keep calling people racists and white supremacists often enough, the words will lose their sting? What happens if that happens?

The case for sedition

I'm not often on the fence, but I can't bring much order to my thoughts about Cliven Bundy's Nevada standoff with the feds. He's an unsympathetic victim fighting an appalling machine. His cause fails to inspire me, and yet the following sentiment rings quite a bell:

 

 Kevin Williamson's piece inspires me with the view that "there is a great deal of real estate between complete submission and civil war, and that acts such as Mr. Bundy’s are not only bearable in a free republic but positively salubrious."  What's more, it can't be a good idea for the federal government to own 87% of Nevada.  At the same time, Bundy looks like one of those people who have lived next-door to a vacant lot for so long that they've come to think of it as their private park, and are aggrieved when a Walmart gets built on it—though they'd never dream of forming a consortium to save up money, buy it, and preserve it in its wild glory.  After I go through all that, I come back to a profound contempt for Harry Reid that leads me to cheer for anyone who puts a stick in his eye.

Still, while I'm cheering the sight of the feds backing down (however temporarily), it's hard to disagree with Charles C.W. Cooke:

[T]his is a nation with a “government of laws and not of men”—and not the other way around—and it seems to me that this principle should not be considered null and void because one of those men happens to have an agreeable tale, a photogenic complaint, and a romantic genealogical past. . . .  Are we really to believe that the government’s backing up its rules with force is unique to Obama? And why would we imagine that Bundy would have a chance if he doesn’t have a case? . . .  “Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action,” Williamson writes, thereby demonstrating the problem rather neatly:  When you change the government, you do not need to worry about setting a precedent; when you merely disobey it, you are setting yourself above a system that remains in force. . . .  When can one refuse to obey the law without expecting to bring the whole thing down?

"Coincidental and unfortunate timing"

The Census Bureau announces that, by sheer coincidence, its household survey questions about health insurance status will be so radically changed this year that it won't be possible to determine how much of the change in status resulted from Obamacare and how much from the new form of question. Sorry about that, guys! I guess they figure they can continue to squeak out votes of over 50% of the population without relying on anyone with a brain.

Signs of Capital Times

I've been in the bleak north for a good part of a week, and made the return crossing of the Mason-Dixon line last night. I will be in the DC area for a few days, if any of you who dwell in those regions are interested.

Inner life of a cell

Terrific animation of the operations of a cell at the individual protein level. There's an ad at the beginning, but you can skip it after the first annoying five seconds.

Friday night STMV

TOS, no less.



Steady. As. She. Goes.

How many episodes do you recognize? Your geek cred depends on it!

On The Road Again

Standards

I see that Mozilla fired its first black CEO this week, because he was against gay marriage six years ago. At least, I assume he was black, since support for Prop 8 was highest among the black community.

What? Oh, not black?

Well, doubtless they'd have handled it the same way if he had been.

Break.

Some say the opposite of love is hate. Others say the opposite of love is indifference. Indifference isn't a bad thing, though. Generally you should beware of the move off indifference that comes from forcing people to care about you. They may not care about you just the way you'd hoped.

I'm inclined to indifference about other people, but I have very certain opinions about being forced to do anything.

Name that poet

I got 14 of these questions wrong (out of 50), and in half of those cases I didn't even get the sex of the poet right.  Wouldn't you think that would be easier to guess?

A Brief Return

I have returned from the Wild. A brief rest, and then I will be gone again -- this time, by motorcycle, as far as Massachusetts. I should have at least periodic internet access, though, so my absence may not be as obvious.

The trip was a qualified success. The food I took did not in any sense need to be heated. It was good and pleasant to eat. I did construct an alcohol stove out of a beer can, which weighs less than an ounce (plus the fuel you carry, of course), and which allows you to cook -- or make coffee.

If you want to make one, here's a quick explanation of an easy method. A much more thorough site on the subject can be found here. I modified mine a little further by turning down and in the edges with a pair of pliers, to eliminate the danger of cuts on the metal. I also added more air intake holes for cleaner burning.

Also of great use to me were these excellent tips on lightweight backpacking. My total pack weight, including five days of food (but only 3 liters of water, expecting to need to find more daily) was right at thirty-five pounds.

The THOR pack functioned adequately during the hike, and was fairly comfortable.

Pros for the pack: Though not a purpose-designed backpacking pack, the THOR is adaptable to a lot of other situations besides backpacking. It would make a pretty good pack for air or train travel, I think. It is designed as a three-day pack, but I was able to carry enough for five days. You could easily use it as a Bug Out Bag, or to strap to the back of a motorcycle. If you need extra space, the overall MOLLE construction allows you to rig extra gear.

Cons: The exterior pockets except for the main compartment are smaller than with many three-day packs. Indeed, internal capacity is much smaller -- 2575 cubic inches instead of 3280 like the model I carried in Iraq. This is compensated for by the extensive MOLLE, which is fine if you are experienced and comfortable rigging gear to MOLLE. Many people would prefer a backpacking pack with a larger internal capacity, so they can stow their gear inside instead of rigging it to the outside. The tradeoff is that such a pack is bulkier, which makes it less flexible.

I think their Reaper pack might be a good middle ground, as it has the capacity to expand its internal storage substantially and has a larger secondary pocket instead of several small external pouches. It also has plenty of MOLLE webbing.

Weather was beautiful, although it suddenly is getting warm about the middle of the day. Seems like it was snowing only yesterday, and suddenly it's hot.

Clever Scots

The Bing cover page picture today is of something called the "Falkirk Wheel," which is a rotating boat-lift lock that connects two sections of canal, with a 40-foot change in elevation, in the Forth Valley in Scotland.  Clicking on the information links took me to a fantastic video explaining how the lift works.  It uses 1.5 kWh per lift, the equivalent of the electricity needed to boil eight teakettles.

The video is on this page, over on the right.

Because We Don't Have Enough Conspiracies to Think About

The US is looking to give up control of the Internet to an international consortium of dubious provenance and more dubious imperatives.

The USPS' first class mail delivery monopoly is under increasing stress from actual competition via the Internet: email, IM, Twitter, etc.

The move to tax commerce that occurs via the Internet is gathering steam.

Are these tied together?

Eric Hines

Off To The Wild

I will be gone for several days, trying out your wonderful suggestions for trail food. I have Boar's Head sausage and hard cheese, walnuts and almonds, dried fruits, and several kinds of bread. Pictured is the Julekage, which turns out to be fantastic. Thank you all.

Friday Night AMV

It's all about the race. Think intergalactic "Cannonball Run".

'Night, Warrior

A better man than me, or than most, passes I trust to his gallant reward.

Snakes on a patio

It's getting so that when I walk into my vet's office, they look up and say, "Another snake bite?"  In a sure sign that spring is here, a water moccasin gave up the ghost at the base of my stairs this morning, but not before hitting the newest little 18-lb. squirt of a dog on the nose.  By the time the NPH got downstairs to see what all three dogs were making such a ruckus about, the snake's body was over here, and the head was over there, still hissing "to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee."

The little dog is not awfully swollen and has already been to the vet for injections of antibiotics and prednisone.  I didn't hear her squeal when the snake struck her, but when she got the shots you could hear her shriek a mile away.  She makes the same noise when I pull a sticker out of her foot, the little faker.  For that matter, if she's caught at the rear of the pack and can't get out the door fast enough, she emits the same ear-piercing scream, so that at first I thought I must have stepped on her and torn off a leg at least.  So she doesn't feel very well, but she seems to be OK.

I'm contending with venomous attacks myself.  Earlier this week some kind of critter stung me here and there on the back and side.  I never saw what it was, but the bites have turned into large angry red places, so I'm breaking down and seeing a doctor later this morning.  It's a hostile world.

She Sounds Vaguely Dissatisfied

I normally ignore the writings of Ms. Coulter, but the title of this piece (which the Jackson Clarion Ledger softened to "Thanks for nothing, Mickey Kaus") got my attention.

If the predictions of leading Obamacare adviser Ezekiel Emanuel's prediction that employer-based health care will be nearly destroyed by the ACA. Ezekiel, which is a very fitting name for a prophet of doom, thinks that about two-thirds of those who currently have employer-backed health care will lose it.

Waivers can drag this out for a while, but eventually people are going to get punched in the mouth.

Etiquette and Protocol

Every medium has them. Right, NBC?

Just In: Air Force fires nine nuclear missile commanders over two-year cheating scandal

— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 27, 2014

I wonder how many people had heart attacks before they got to word nine?

Fire escape

So our little fireball turned out to be no big deal, but here's some nail-biting video from yesterday's five-alarm apartment-building fire in Houston.  (I recommend watching with the sound turned off.)  The construction worker shows real presence of mind.

Update:  Hey, didn't anyone like this?  I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Our pipeline just blew up

Nobody was hurt, as far as I can tell.  Maybe an oyster boat caught the pipeline with its dragline.  Besides the impressive video, the main effect seems to be that our peninsula will be without natural gas for the foreseeable future.  Luckily we're on a propane tank, being the extra-boonified section of this part of the boonies.

Cool tech

Someone pointed me to IEEE Spectrum for better than usual science journalism.  Here are some catchy articles about nano-labs on tiny fiber-optic tubes, infrared contact lenses, and (for Cassandra) an electrical tiara said to relieve migraine headaches.

KDS

Koch Derangement Syndrome.  If it weren't for the leftist press and certain close relatives, I'd never even have heard of the Koch brothers, although it turns out they control all my thoughts.  Harry Reid can't seem to shut up about them lately, in his increasing desperation to change the subject.  The Washington Post ran a typical hit piece recently, blaming the Koch brothers' support for the Keystone XL pipeline (about which they have been studiously neutral) on their status as the biggest lessees of the associated tar sands (which is untrue).  John Hinderaker (PowerLine) ran an intelligent response.  The Washington Post struck back, explaining that it's not important whether an article is both false and malicious, as long as it promotes spirited debate.  It's an interesting approach; would the WaPo be pleased with a thought-provoking article accusing Barack Obama of kidnapping and eating the passengers of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

Hinderaker replies again, with an attempt to demystify the double-standard:

So we have a contrast that couldn’t be clearer:  the Washington Post published a false story about support for Keystone because it fit the Democratic Party’s agenda.  It covered up a similar, but true story about [wealthy Democratic donor Tom Steyer's] opposition to the pipeline (and about “green” politics in general) because that, too, fit the Democratic Party’s agenda.  I don’t think we need to look any further to connect the dots.

This Should Be Fun

Anyone want to take Paul Krugman's side against Nate Silver?

Similarly, climate science has been developed by many careful researchers who are every bit as good at data analysis as Silver, and know the physics too, so ignoring them and hiring a known irresponsible skeptic to cover the field is a very good way to discredit your enterprise. Economists work hard on the data; on the whole you’re going to do better by tracking their research than by trying to roll your own, and you should be very wary if your analysis runs counter to what a lot of professionals say.

Basically, it looks as if Silver is working from the premise that the supposed experts in every field are just like the political analysts at Politico, and that there is no real expertise he needs to take on board. If he doesn’t change that premise, his enterprise is going to run aground very fast.

My guess is that he's right about that: not that there is no expertise anywhere, but that the loud claims to expertise are safely -- indeed wisely -- ignored.

Goodness knows that you'd have made a ton of money in 2008 if you'd bet heavily on an analysis that 'ran counter to what a lot of professional economists said.' You'd still be making money, in fact: economic stories featuring the word "unexpectedly" have become a joke, they're so common.

Firenado

Here's something you don't see every day.

The Path By The Water

The British legal system has decided to accept the inequality of women, at least for Islamic wills.

Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.

"High Street" is a British term roughly equivalent to the American "Main Street." What's being discussed here is not a centralized action, then, but the kind of thing that will flow naturally from small actors across the country.

Cultural Degradation

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a piece explaining why he thinks white progressives are wrong to assign 'cultural residue' from Jim Crow a leading role in the problems afflicting the black community. I think he has to be right about this part of his argument:

In his masterful history, Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools. The reformers "had little previous contact with blacks" and their views were largely cribbed from Uncle Tom's Cabin. They thus believed blacks to be culturally degraded and lacking in family instincts, prone to lie and steal, and generally opposed to self-reliance.... In short, white progressives coming South expected to find a black community suffering the effects of not just oppression but its "cultural residue." ...

[What they actually found was that b]y 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also "quite incidentally" from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, "the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them."

The point here is rich and repeated in American history—it was not "cultural residue" that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freedpeople to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.

"In their eyes," wrote an official from the Freedmen's Bureau, in 1865. "The work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited."

Coates goes on to impute from this that the problems afflicting the black society today are also due to white supremacy, which systematically damages black attempts to live together in the family structures they would prefer if un-oppressed.

I'm unpersuaded by that conclusion, and I'll tell you why. The difference between the 1865 case and the 1950-present case is that, in the present case, the collapse of marriage and family is occurring across all "racial" demographics. Some of these groups are more afflicted than others, but all are afflicted, and the afflictions track each other.

The likelihood isn't that blacks are being forced by some white supremacist structure not to marry, or to divorce. It is that there is a broader cultural degradation -- affecting the whole of American culture, and many other cultures worldwide, especially in the First world -- that is destroying the family as an institution.

It is the same force that is destroying the other human connections that serve as a bulwark between the atomic individual, alone and weak, and the power of the almighty state. The heritage of white supremacy, or its ongoing structures to whatever degree they exist, could at most explain why the black family began its collapse before the white family, which also explains why black families are less likely to be strong today than white families or Hispanic families.

But all these families are collapsing along the same trend line.

The view from outside

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

From Bookworm Room, links to travel guides for people visiting the U.S. from Japan, Russia, and France.

HB 60 -- Different Views from Two Gun Rights Organizations

Georgia has just passed its first new gun law in some years, HB 60. As someone who receives a lot of email from various Georgia legislative lobbies, I'm struck by the differential on how the two leading gun rights organizations in Georgia are portraying this bill.

NRA-ILA:

Georgia: Historic Victory for the Second Amendment

...Your gun rights were not only preserved this year, but were restored and advanced further than they ever have in the history of the Peach State. This truly is an historic day for Georgia gun owners, shooters and sportsmen....

This resounding victory must first and foremost be credited to our members, who tirelessly worked to ensure that passage of this bill was possible. We also thank the following state lawmakers who went above and beyond this year and were critical in seeing this bill through to the end...

Georgia Gun Owners:

In the end, Republicans at the Capitol caved to internal and extrenal forces [Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun groups] and gutted the bill of clean "church carry," any form of "campus carry," refused to allow committee hearings or a vote on "constitutional carry," and continue to leave our children unprotected, sitting ducks at thousands of elementary, middle and high schools in the state.

In one of the most Republican-dominated legislatures in the country, Republicans caved on core Second Amendment issues, more scared of the media and Michael Bloomberg than their actual constituents....

Nathan Deal, Lt. Governor Cagle, and other establishment Republicans played politics with your gun rights for four years, passing and signing just one gun bill during that time.

Ironically, a gun bill passed this year, when Deal needed it the most -- in an election year when he's out looking for votes and endorsements of gun groups.

If Deal is re-elected, expect four more years of his administration working to kill gun legislation.

GGO bills itself as Georgia's only "no-compromise" gun rights organization, and clearly it is that. This was an NRA-ILA bill, and they got it through in part by yielding up a lot of the things GGO wanted.

I have some concerns about the mental health requirements, not because they are especially onerous, but because there's simply no way to prove one's mental health. If it comes to be questioned, even if there is a relief process through the courts, there is going to be a crap-shoot aspect to the process: relief will depend on drawing a good judge or jury. Mental health doesn't admit of lab tests, or certainty in diagnosis, or really any form of genuine proof at all. If you are put on the list, you just may never get back off again no matter what you do or how deserving you are.

That said, I understand why people worry so much about mental cases with guns. It's a kind of tragedy that we don't have a better way of understanding mental health than we do, here as elsewhere.

Trapping carbon

I'd very much like to hear Douglas's views on this.

Get on with it

More from Maggie's Farm this morning.  Mark Steyn has no patience with his co-defendants' plodding and traditional approach to defending the absurd defamation lawsuit brought by warmenist Michael Mann, who resents the ridicule he received at Steyn's hands a few years back.  Steyn is champing at the bit to review the documents that Mann is obligated to supply as part of the discovery phase of the trial, which Steyn's co-defendants are trying to delay, as corporate defendants typically do, while they seek dismissal of the lawsuit.

I think it ought to be possible to litigate a 270-word blog post in under 270 weeks.  So let's get on with it.

Steyn adds:

Kind readers continue to ask about my "legal defense fund".  I don't have one, in part because I'm now on legal offense.

Steyn has countersued Mann for $30 million.  That puts him more in the position of a plaintiff, and plaintiffs typically pursue discovery aggressively.  Anyone inspired to contribute is welcome to click on his website and buy books or commemorative objects.

Issues that fly under the radar

In an interesting examination of why some "controversies" soak up all the media attention while others are nearly invisible, Scott Sumner lists seven policies that, in his experience, no one has ever heard of.

1. Federal coastal flood insurance.
2. Zoning laws forcing the construction of parking lots.
3. Restrictions on taxi medallions.
4. Quotas on sugar imports.
5. Huge urban/rural water price differentials.
6. Restrictions of the ability of foreign air carriers to serve US markets.
7. Occupational licensing restrictions where there is no public policy purpose.

I drew a blank on 2., 5., and 6.

Friday Night AMV

Speaking of satire, you don't often see it as obvious as this. Heh.

BNW

A serious problem in Britain:

New NHS figures indicate a ‘long-term downward trend’ in alcohol consumption. But medical experts have warned that Britons who are not either slightly drunk or hungover will be unable to mentally process the awfulness that surrounds them.

Doctor Tom Logan said: “I’m seeing patients who are very agitated and confused. They’re convinced that everyone is pretty hostile, the country is run by shady criminals and Essex is a real place.

“I have to explain that all these notions are entirely accurate, but they’re just noticing for the first time because they’re off the sauce.

“We must introduce a minimum alcohol intake – I’d suggest three pints per day – to provide a ‘booze cushion’ against the awfulness of reality."

It's a satire. Of course it is.

Sly's Breakfast Cookies

For those of you eagerly awaiting the recipe, traffic follows.

1 c. butter
1 1/2 c. sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 c. flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
4 1/2 c. quick-cooking oatmeal
1 1/2 c. grated cheese
15-20 slices cooked and crumbled bacon

Cream butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla together. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt. Stir into creamed mix. Stir in oatmeal, cheese and bacon.
Bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 until lightly browned on the edges...about 7-10 min.
Let cool completely before trying to take them off the pan as they will fall apart otherwise.
Enjoy!

Jeeves disapproves

We've been enjoying episodes of Wooster and Jeeves, with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as young sprouts.





Shortly after that last scene, we see members of Wooster's club dancing the "Newt" to the tune of "47 Ginger-Haired Sailors."

We're All Going To Die

"Although the study is largely theoretical[.]"

Municipal competence

Only Detroit could lose money on parking tickets.

So runne the excellente menne their race

From the adventures of Cortez in Mexico, before he even meets Montezuma.  You get the idea there's a lot missing from the story from the point of view of the other characters:

At that time one Iuan Xuarez natural of the Citie of Granada, carried to the Ile of Cuba his mother and thrée sisters, whiche came to the Iland of Santo Domingo, with that vicequéene the Lady Mary of Toledo, in Anno .1509. hoping to marrie them there with rich men, for they were very poore. And the one of them named Cathelina was wont to say, That she shoulde be a greate Gentlewoman: it was eyther hyr dreames and fantasies, or else some Astronomer hadde made hir beléeue so, but hir mother was reported to bée very cunning. The maydens were beautifull, for which cause, and also being there but fewe Spanishe women, they were muche made of, and often feasted. But Cortez was woer to the saide Cathelina, and at the ende married with hir: Although at the first there was some strife about the matter, and Cortez put in prison, bycause he refused hir for his wife, but she demaunded him as hir husband by faith and troth of hand. . . .  Contrariwyse Iames Velasques gaue credit to his talebearers, bicause Cortez refused to marrie [with] Cathelina Xuarez, & vsed vncourteous words vnto him in ye presence of many that stoode by . . . . 

And when Cortez sawe himselfe in the stockes, he feared some proces of false witnesse, as many times dothe happen in those parties. At time conueniente he brake the locke off the stockes, and layde hand upon the Sword and Target of the kéeper, and brake up a windowe, escaping thereby into the stréete, and tooke the Church for Sanctuary. But when Iaymes Velasques had notice thereof, he was greatlye offended with Christopher Lagos the Jayler, saying, that for money he had losed him: wherefore he procured by al meanes to plucke him out of the Sanctuary. But Cortez hauing intelligence of his dealing, did resiste and withstand his force. Yet notwithstanding one daye Cortez walking before the Churche dore, and being carelesse of his businesse, was caught by the backe with a Serieant called Iohn Esquier and others, and then was put aboorde a Shyppe vnder hatches. 

Cortez was welbeloued among his neighboures, who did well consider the euill will that the Gouernour bare vnto him. But nowe Cortez séeing himselfe vnder hatches, despaired of his libertie, and did verily thinke, that he shoulde be sent prisoner to the Chancerie of Santo Domingo, or else to Spayne, who being in this extremitie, soughte all meanes to get hys foote out of the chayne, and at length he gote it out, and the same nighte he changed his apparell with a ladde that serued him, and by the Pump of the Shippe he gote out, not heard of any his kéepers, climbing softly along the Shippe syde, he entred the Skiffe and went hys way therewith, and bycause they shoulde not pursue after him, he losed the Boate of another Shippe that roade by them. The Currant of Macaguanigua a riuer of Barucoa, was so fierce, that he could not gette in with his Skiffe, bicause he had no help to row, & was also very werie, fearing to be drowned if he should put himselfe to the land, wherefore he stripped himselfe naked, and tyed a nyght-kerchiefe aboute hys head, with certayne wrytings apperteyning to his office of Notarie and Clearkshippe to the Treasourer, and other things that were agaynst the Gouernoure Iames Velasques, and in this sorte swamme to lande, and wente home to hys owne house, and spake with Iohn Xuarez hys brother in law, and tooke Sanctuarie agayne with Armour. 

Then the Gouernoure Iames Velasques sente hym worde, that all matters shoulde bée forgotten, and that they shoulde remayne friendes, as in tyme past they hadde bin, and to goe with hym to the Warres agaynste certayne Indians that hadde rebelled. Cortez made hym no aunswere, but incontinent married with mistresse Catalina Xuarez according to his promise, and to lyue in peace. Iames Velasques procéeded on hys iourney wyth a greate companye agaynste the Rebelles. 

Then sayde Cortez to hys brother in lawe Iohn Xuares, bryng me (quoth he) my Launce and my Crosbowe to the Townes ende. And so in that euening hée wente out of Sanctuarie, and taking hys Crossebowe in hande, hée wente with his brother in lawe to a certayne Farme, where Iames Velasques was alone, with his householde seruauntes, for hys armye was lodged in a Village thereby, and came thither somewhat late, and at suche tyme as the Gouernoure was perusing hys Booke of charges, and knocked at his dore which stoode open, saying: Héere is Cortez that woulde speake with the Gouernoure, and so wente in. 

When Iames Velasques sawe hym armed, and at such an houre, he was maruellously afrayde, desiring hym to rest hymselfe, and also to accepte hys Supper: No Sir (quoth he) my onely comming is, but to knowe the complayntes you haue of me, and to satisfye you therein, and also to bée youre friende and seruitor. They then embraced eache other in token of friendship. And after long talke, they lay both in one bedde, where Iames de Orrelano founde them, who went to carrie newes to the Gouernoure, how Cortez had fledde. 

After this sort came Cortez agayne to his former friendshyppe with Iames Velasques, and procéeded with him to the Warres, but afterwarde at his returne, he was lyke to haue bin drowned in the sea: For as he came from the Caues of Bani to visite certayne of hys Shepheardes and Indians that wrought in the Pines of Barrucoa where his dwelling was, his Canoa or little boate ouerthrew, being night, and halfe a league from land, with tempeste, wherby he was put to his shiftes, and forced to swimme, and happened to espye lyght that certayne Shepheardes had which were at supper néere the Sea side. By suche like perils and daungers, runne the excellente menne their race, vntill that they arriue at the Hauen where their good lotte is preserued.

Don't stand up

Can't get enough of books about how people behave in a crisis.  Why? you might wonder, since I've practically never faced a crisis.  Anyway, it's an obsession.  I'm enjoying Amanda Ripley's book "The Unthinkable."  Here's brief advice from a Kansas City fireman:

Richard Gist, a psychologist with the fire department, has had to notify hundreds of Kansas City residents that a family member has died in a fire.  Over and over again, they ask him why their loved one didn't simply walk out of the door or climb out the window.  They have no concept of what it would be like to be in a fire.  "I very frequently find myself standing with the survivors in a burned home explaining how their loved one died.  They say 'Why didn't they just...?'  You have to explain to them that it was 2:00 A.M., and they woke up out of a dead sleep."  If you wake up in heavy, hot smoke and stand up, you're already dead from scorched lungs.  You have to roll out of bed and crawl to an exit, not an easy thing to remember.  That's why Gist spends much of his time trying to get people to put batteries in their smoke detectors and practice evacuating before a fire, so that escaping becomes automatic.  Echoing every disaster expert I've ever met, Gist says, "If you have to stop and think it through, then you will not have time to survive."

Ripley looked into survival rates for the flooded areas of New Orleans during Katrina.  Neither race nor income was a good predictor, nor does she attribute the disaster primarily to the incompetence of local officials. At least half of survivors readily admitted they could have left if they'd really wanted to, so why didn't they?  Age was a strong predictive factor.  Ripley has two theories.  One is that people of a certain age had weathered Hurricanes Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969, leading to a fatal misapprehension of the risk from Katrina.  Those hurricanes, she suggests, killed more people in 2005 than when they hit in 1965 or 1969, just from their impact on attitudes.  (The flip side is that twice as many people as expected evacuated during Rita a few week later, an over-reaction that led to its own problems.)  Another theory is that many of us, as we age, because gradually less capable of acting decisively to turn our routines on their heads.  Heaven knows I don't think we could dislodge my mother-in-law from her house with dynamite, even if a Category 5 storm were bearing directly down on her.  We'd have to slip her a Micky and carry her out.

Age aside, though, and strangely, in many fires people don't leap for the exits the way you'd guess they might.  You'd like them to go all Jason Bourne, springing into action a nanosecond after perceiving the threat, but instead they stop, consider, mill around, and sometimes inexplicably become rooted to the spot, even before you take into account the intense panic and disorientation that come with heavy smoke.  Ripley's Kansas City contact told her about training sessions in which young firefighters were made to crawl blindly through smoke until they were tangled in wires, from which they had to cut themselves loose.  The very thought makes me want to get up this instant and walk outside, but who knows whether I'd go rigid in the grip of the wires, or take maniacally effective action to break free?  I still vividly remember the feral crouch my brain went into when I underwent smoke-filled tunnel training.  I kept moving purposefully, but only by an extreme effort of will that didn't leave much room for high-level cognition.  I'll never understand how people can spelunk.

"That Bourne--he's hard to catch."

On Leadership

We've just had a long discussion on what leadership isn't over at Cass' place. Nick at Ranger Up has some ideas on what it is. They're military focused, but we can probably break out the principles for other sorts of leadership roles -- parenthood, church, community leadership, or perhaps even leadership lessons that apply in different sorts of corporate organization in spite of differences in corporate culture.

One thing I don't see in Nick's list is any presumption that position = authority = respect. You can come to find yourself in a position for which you are unqualified (especially in the case of parenthood!). Your authority to hold that position has to be earned through hard work. The respect that comes from doing your job well does not belong by right to just anyone holding the position. The position is an opportunity, not an entitlement.

An Experiment

For those of you who are parents, try this experiment. See what you get.



The right answer should be obvious to the child if you've done your job.

Not Keeping The Money

Several Georgia congressmen decided that they shouldn't keep their public salaries during the recent shutdown. They differed on what to do with the money, however.

Rep. Jack Kingston (R) said he donated his salary to his church, per a spokesperson.
Rep. Doug Collins (R) donated his salary to three different groups in Gainesville.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R) wrote a check to the U.S. Treasury.
Rep. John Barrow (D) donated $5,936 to the Wounded Warrior project, according to the Washington Post.

That reads like only Re. Gingrey was reasoning that it was wrong to accept money from the taxpayers for duties not performed. The others didn't accept personal enrichment, but chose to pursue other (all quite worthy) goals.

What do you think is the right course?

About sums it up for me

From Jazz Shaw.

Maps and time

This kind of animated map has been making the rounds lately, as people struggle to understand Islam, or the Crimea.  What's more engrossing for me is the splintered condition of Germany between the late 15th and late 18th centuries.  Once they got it together, look out!

I wonder if Germany really was exceptional in its disunity during that time, or if it's more an artifact of the map-drawer's decisions about graphics.  Someone here who's less ignorant of post-14th-century European may be able to help me.

Ave

A beautiful piece, to end the day.

For Those Who Might Want Coffee Tomorrow...

...a delightful exploration of the magic of caffeine.

"If I had Bill Gates's resources . . . ."

Via Assistant Village Idiot, a hilarious article about Bill Gates's failure to measure up to rarified standards of philanthropy.  Apparently he saves millions of lives with his own money, but his progressive principles are lacking.  Even more hilarious comments.  "Well, if someone gave me his money, I'd be even more idealistically generous!"

Éirinn go Brách

"Ireland forever." Should I be wearing orange today?  I fear my ancestors were confirmed Ulstermen, nothing like romantic Irish revolutionaries.  I turned to the internet this morning to find out what and how I should be celebrating.  It informs me that "Éirinn go Brách," or rather the Anglicized "Erin go bragh," showed up on the flag of some deserting Americans, including Irishmen, who went over the Mexican side in the Mexican-American War, calling themselves Los San Patricios, or St. Patrick's Batallion. Always on the losing side of history, poor fellows, which explains the humorous translation of "It's Irish for you're f**cked."

The Wiki entry also clears up a long-term mystery about crossword puzzle clues, which may be asking for either "Erin" or "Eire" in referring to the Ould Sod. It seems that Eire is nominative, but the dative form "Erin" is used colloquially even as the subject of a sentence. Back to the proper method of celebrating today. I can remember singing "The Wearing of the Green" in elementary school, back when there was music in elementary school and traditional songs of this sort could be sung without spurring a federal investigation. I understand Lenten restrictions are lifted for the day, which encourages alcohol consumption. An Irish Member of Parliament introduced legislation to close the bars on March 17 to prevent drinking from getting out of hand, a measure that must have been inspired by some truly legendary drinking in order to have excited comment in Ireland.

All in all, I don't find any trace of North-vs.-South tension in the traditional acknowledgements of the day, so I feel free to pull out my tin whistles, wear green, and listen to this:

 

Happy St. Patty's Day!

The Deer's Cry

St. Patrick's Day is not what many think it is, but it is a good day.

The way models make us feel is the important thing

From Maggie's Farm, a memoir of World War II:

“Some of my colleagues had the responsibility of preparing long-range weather forecasts, i.e., for the following month,” Arrow wrote.  “The statisticians among us subjected these forecasts to verification and found they differed in no way from chance.” 

Alarmed, Arrow and his colleagues tried to bring this important discovery to the attention of the commanding officer.  At last the word came down from a high-ranking aide. 

“The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good,” the aide said haughtily.  “However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

Suckers

Looking past the secular piety in this NYT article on Ukraine and game theory, a lesson:

[A]fter the Soviet Union split into many pieces in the 1990s, a newly independent Ukraine gave up its portion of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal. In part, it did so in exchange for a memorandum supporting its territorial integrity, signed by both Russia and the United States.

Eliminating its nuclear weapons may have seemed a good deal for Ukraine at the time, and it can be argued that the world became a safer place. Yet if Ukraine were a nuclear power today, it would surely have a far greater ability to deter Russian military action.

Those who beat their swords into plowshares will eventually be enslaved by those who kept their swords.

Coal Country Just Says "No"

You can push people only so far, and then they may start examining deeply held assumptions about who's on the side of the angels after all.  The 7th most senior member of the House is polling badly against a Republican challenger in West Virginia.

There's the usual attempt to blame shadowy billionaires from New York.  Those Koch brothers are behind everything.  My own sister sends me emails complaining about them.  She thinks they're behind an initiative to destroy the union she works for--by eliminating the union's right to collect dues from people who'd rather not join.  It's a subject I've learned not to discuss with her, beyond reassuring her that the Pennsylvania initiative she's worried about doesn't appear to be getting any traction.  Let people make a free decision whether to join a union?  That's crazy talk.

"Four."

A little girl explains why her mother is the best of mothers.



Via my father, for reasons best known to him.

ST II-II Q 158 S.C., CO.

Phil at Brandywine Books links to a piece on the decline of religious liberty, which warns Christians to ponder the beam in their eye.

I suspect that within my lifetime American Christians, at least those who hold traditional theological and more views, will be faced with a number of situations in which they will have to choose between compromising their consciences and civil disobedience. In such a situation there are multiple temptations. The most obvious is to silence the voice of conscience in order to get along. But there are also the temptations of responding in anger, in resentment, in bitterness, in vengeance. It might be a good exercise in self-examination for each of us to figure out which temptation is most likely for us.

I think the temptation for me is to anger. But I consult the wise, and find that anger is not always a sin.

On the contrary, Chrysostom [Hom. xi in the Opus Imperfectum, falsely ascribed to St. John Chrysostom] says: "He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked." Therefore to be angry is not always an evil....

[E]vil may be found in anger, when, to wit, one is angry, more or less than right reason demands. But if one is angry in accordance with right reason, one's anger is deserving of praise.

Hobbit doors

"Never make anything simple and efficient if a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful."

One man

Hal Douglas, who narrated a big chunk of all the movie trailers you've ever watched, died recently at the age of 89.  Here he is in a trailer for a Jerry Seinfeld movie, playing a guy who narrates movie trailers.  I understand the movie didn't do that well, but the trailer has been watched on YouTube over 700,000 times.

Monopoly German-style

As it would be played by Freud, Marx, Carnap, and Nietszche.

Win with Obamacare

The New Republic has the real scoop on the effect of Obamacare on the Democrats' recent loss of a special election in Florida.   It was not, as the conventional wisdom suggests, a question of popular revulsion against Obamacare taking down a well-known and well-funded Democrat.  The real problem is that Chief Justice Roberts struck a more deadly blow than we knew when he prevented the feds from bullying the states into taking on an expensive expansion of Medicaid.  Many voters below 138% of the poverty line now find themselves ineligible both for Medicaid and for subsidized Obamacare exchange policies, which is--you guessed it--the Republicans' fault.  So all Democrats have to do is explain this, and reap a zillion grateful votes in November.

You may not have noticed that the President waffled on another promise this week (who can keep track?), concerning your ability to keep your doctor. What he meant to say, and what we were too dumb to understand, is that you would have to give up your doctor in order to save money on your new, much higher premiums.

 

Friday Night AMV

Her Kung-fu is pretty good.

Interestingly, this is a US written and produced show for Nickelodeon.

What you sound like to foreigners

This woman is a good mimic.  You have to wait through her impressions of several languages before she gets to UK English and then to American English, but they're both convincing despite being gibberish.

It Is Very Important To Let Yourself Love Only Women Of Character

For example, the kind of stand-up girls who will confess to dad that you were invited into their bedroom at 2:20 AM.

Nonsense, Its Arcane and Irrelevant

I suppose I ought to be surprised to find myself in agreement with NPR, but I suppose it can happen now and again.

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared by intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

Unfortunately, that also goes for philosophical error.

A Psychologist Diagnoses Humanity

Inventing a new and universal mental disorder -- 'juvenioa' -- out of whole cloth, psychologist Chris Ferguson writes:

Every generation believes that the generation before was too rigid and conservative—and the generation after too wild and out-of-control.

Speaking as a member of the generation after the Baby Boom, let me assure you that this generalization does not hold true. Any criticisms I would field toward nearby generations are, if anything, wholly reversed -- except that the 'rigidity' exhibited by the Millenials tends to be left-leaning rather than 'conservative.'

Insofar as it is useful to criticize a 'generation,' that is. There were, and are, lots of good folks in both.

The blueberry in the tomato soup

It's too bad Rick Perry crashed and burned in the last presidential election cycle, because he's a solid guy.  I enjoyed his interview with Jimmy Kimmel at Austin's SXSW festival, where he shrugged off boos from the crowd by observing that Austin was "the blueberry in the tomato soup" of Texas.  Kimmel asked him about reports that he'd shot a coyote while jogging.  "You carry a gun while you're jogging?" he asked, amazed.  "I carry a gun to interviews," Perry replied.

It's probably hard to imagine, if you don't live in one of Texas's larger cities, how utterly the polite classes here loathe the Governor.  "Governor Good-Hair," they usually call him, appalled by the bad name he gives to the state.  He does have pretty good hair.

Backpacking

I'm getting ready for a 5-day, 50 mile hike on the AT early next month. One of the irritating things about the AT authorities is that they do not permit open fires anywhere on the trail. As a result, you have to either haul a stove (or some alternative heat source), or do without.

This time I'm thinking of doing without, but I need to figure out good meals with plenty of calories, protein, and carbs, but which never need to be heated. Obviously sealed, hard-cured sausages and nuts are good protein sources. I could take pre-baked cakes of various kinds (perhaps aiming for something like lembas), as long as they were baked hard enough that they won't go bad over a few days. Dried fruits, maybe.

Actually, on reflection, maybe I should just go back through the Hobbit and Fellowship of the Rings to see what they are given at their various waystations. Tolkien seems to have known a lot about trekking.

Do any of you have suggestions?

Please Stop Helping

Over at Cass', I've been arguing that conservatives should pay more attention to the difficulties of the working man. By the same token, it would be really helpful if the Obama administration would pay much less.

On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.

So the geniuses who came up with Obamacare -- to force evil corporations to provide their workers with health insurance -- ended up creating the following effects:

1) Part time workers, who used to carry fewer than 40 hours a week, now carry fewer than 29 hours a week to stay under the mandates.

2) Full time jobs largely ceased being created, because they come with the mandate.

3) Part time jobs were increasingly likely to be classified as 'temporary' or 'seasonal,' which means they can be paid less than minimum wage.

4) Businesses close to the mandatory lines either shrank to get under the line, or stopped expanding to avoid getting over it.

5) Regulatory uncertainty prevented job creation and new business formation.

Now you're going to 'force evil corporations to pay overtime.' What that means is:

A) Reduced hours, and,

B) Pay cuts.

Stop it. I agree that we should be giving more attention to the misery afflicting the lower-middle and working classes in America, because this recession has been brutal on them. The Right needs to develop its own discussion about how to address those problems, though, because the Left's solutions invariably make things worse.

Attention Womyn!

A buried bomb lies within this enjoyable little piece about linguistic drift:

Borrowing from other languages can give rise to an entirely understandable and utterly charming kind of mistake. With little or no knowledge of the foreign tongue, we go for an approximation that makes some kind of sense in terms of both sound and meaning. This is folk etymology. Examples include crayfish, from the French écrevisse (not a fish but a kind of lobster); sparrow grass as a variant for asparagus in some English dialects; muskrat (conveniently musky, and a rodent, but named because of the Algonquin word muscascus meaning red); and female, which isn't a derivative of male at all, but comes from old French femelle meaning woman.

"Woman" has an interesting etymology too, in terms of drifts of the type the article is talking about. The use of '-man' is a drift of that sort, with the original word having a non-masculine form of 'human being,' "quean." (A related word: "English is one of the few Indo-European languages to have a word for "queen" that is not a feminine derivative of a word for 'king.'")

Not that it matters, of course, because the folk etymology is true in the minds of the folk. Still, it's interesting given how many times I've heard the charge brought up over the years.

Visual feasts

I started clicking links at the joke site Grim linked to.

Maybe They're Both Wrong

I have some sympathy for the judge in the BG Sinclair case. On the one hand, the general is clearly in the wrong to some degree, and has already plead guilty to some charges that would have resulted in serious punishment for an enlisted man or NCO. On the other hand, the command influence problem seems to be real -- real enough that the judge has dismissed the jury over it, and has to reconsider how to proceed.

The judge has decided not to dismiss the charges entirely, though that option existed.

More Jokes

Since you all enjoyed the last set, here's a similar set of jokes. There's a small amount of overlap, but mostly they are different.

Field Hospital

We're going somewhere interesting with this, I guess. But this is exactly right.

Pope Francis told an interviewer last year that the church should be a, “field hospital after battle.” He added, “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.”

Foreign Policy

Regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, there is little difference among most Republicans on what to do. All of us believe we should stand up to Putin's aggression. Virtually no one believes we should intervene militarily. So we are then faced with a finite menu of diplomatic measures to isolate Russia, on most of which we all agree, such as sanctions and increased economic pressure.

Yet, some politicians have used this time to beat their chest. What we don't need right now is politicians who have never seen war talking tough for the sake of their political careers.

America deserves better than that. So do our soldiers.

What our soldiers deserve is victory. It doesn't make sense to deploy them where they cannot win. Nor where we will not let them.

For T99

But here’s the most important thing she told me: Despite the fact that the middle-school principal herself told me I had a legal right to opt out (and none of the players in this morality play ever told us otherwise, whether explicitly or implicitly), that’s not actually true. In Colorado, kids are required by law to test. The “refuse testing” option on the enrollment forms? It’s “being phased out” because it’s “confusing.” If kids don’t show up for school on testing days? Zurkowski told me that some districts have sent truant officers to their homes.

The author is a law professor. I'm surprised by how many people go into the law with a hatred for institutional discipline. Maybe it's the same reason that the most messed up people on earth are the ones who choose to pursue psychology?

An Author Writes to Vladimir Putin

The author is a fan. Huge fan.

Follow-up Advice

Back in January I asked for some advice on all kinds of stuff -- camping, horsemanship, hunting, martial arts, etc. And I got some really good feedback from the Hall. This is a follow-up post with some results & more requests for advice.

I ended up buying a surplus 'Military Sleep System' and am looking forward to trying it out on a trip in a couple of weeks.

I asked for suggestions on boots for hiking & hunting. Some of my reading since then suggests that, especially when you're packing light, running or trail-running shoes are a good choice. I also remember Grim talking about his sister, I believe, running barefoot. I'm looking at hiking in low hills carrying less than 30 lbs, only in decent weather -- no extreme cold or heat, no snow hiking, no real mountains, no monsoon trekking. Anyone have experience with or thoughts on this?

Along with that, I've been reading about feet a lot lately, and am thinking about getting some Vibram FiveFingers. Any thoughts on the whole FiveFingers / barefoot running movement? Would any of you hike in these things? UPDATE: These boots also look interesting.

Once I get out and start using gear, I'll post reports and pics.

Thanks in advance!

A Little Sunday Morning Celtic Punk

Flatfoot 56 is a Celtic punk band out of Chicago. They also happen to be openly Christian. Here's one even those who don't like any kind of punk might like.

Reading faster

Spritz is publicizing a speed-reading app that really seems to work.  The program feeds you one word at a time.  This site lets you experiment with up to 600 wpm, though apparently the program can go faster.  I guess the idea is to load your reading material into the program, which is something I'd like to try.

Lost flight

It's starting to look as though the missing Malaysian flight en route to Beijing was the victim of some kind of explosion.  The Boeing 777 and its experienced pilots lost contact shortly after reaching cruising altitude, in crystal-clear weather, without any sign of distress.  It may or may not be a coincidence that two passengers were traveling on passports that had previously been stolen in Thailand.

Boids

A team of Hungarian programmers struggle to teach autonomous drone copters to use alignment, attraction, and avoidance to simulate the flocking behavior of birds.

Can they ever be taught to behave as beautifully as these roosting starlings near Oxford, England?

Evolution of Species

For those of you who followed YAG's and my long discussion of whether there really is such a thing as "species" outside the human mind, an article on translating Darwin into Arabic, which lacks a word for species. How do you begin to convey the concept?

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
And:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.

It's strange to think that Tennyson was wrong, but perhaps -- at least in animals -- the single life is all there is. It is different in plants. You can take a cutting off a tree and graft it to another, often even one of a very different 'type.' You can pluck a green twig and put it in the right compound, and it will grow a new tree.

Perhaps we could do that with adequately advanced technology even with people. Presumably if I took your right arm and made a new you, it would not be the same person. The seat of consciousness would differ, and that alone means you are not the same. Do trees have consciousness? Somehow they know the sun.

Fear and Awe

Perhaps it's no surprising that I gave a minute to this 'test,' because is built strictly around mythology.

What Kind Of Mythical Creature Are You?

You got: Dragon

You inspire fear and awe, and you’re fiercely protective of the people and possessions you cherish. You’re a creature of comfort, you enjoy living luxuriously, but you’re by no means lazy. If provoked, you’re a fearsome enemy, but you’re not easily angered. You enjoy time to yourself, but you also require intellectual stimulation, because behind all that raw power, you’re also sharp as a tack.