On Working Together

A writer from Jezebel named Erin Gloria Ryan drops into the PUAhate chatroom for a while, and listens to E. Rodger's friends wax lyrical about rape and the murder of women.

12:42 PM

I am in a hotel in Washington, DC, and my boyfriend is taking a bath, reading. I barge in, demanding to know if all men are terrible, eyes blazing. He tries to calm me down, but I am upset.

I leave the bathroom in a huff.

The answer to your question, which your boyfriend probably doesn't quite know how to express, is approximately yes. Men are killers by nature, especially when they are young. I think this is one of the things women have the most trouble imagining about what it is like to be a man, and it is certainly one of the thing that civilization works hardest to hide about the human condition. Civilization works very hard to achieve social harmony.

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective).

I imagine the young woman would think I was a terrible person too, but I would never harm a lady. I have spent a fair portion of my life learning how to kill other men. I would, though, lay down my life on any instant -- today or any day -- to stop one of these massacres from happening. California has done everything it can do to put the brakes on people like me.

Since the massacre a lot of the momentum has been not directly related to the kind of deadly dangerous misogyny displayed by these little monsters, but on feminist objections to what they call 'everyday sexism.' Amanda Hess explains that her male readers are shocked by this, because they never encounter it:

Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around.

...

It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a convenience store to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop across the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body. When my boyfriend came out of the convenience store, he shut up.

These are forms of male aggression that only women see. But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”

Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize.

What comes across strikingly to me, reading this, is the degree to which the most effective solution to the problem of bad men is good men. The protection afforded by a good man who loves you or befriends you is so great that the problem effectively disappears while they are around. This is not because harassers respect other men more than you, but because they are afraid of us.

They ought to be. Some of us are far, far more terrible than they are.

This seems to me to be a clear-cut case when men and women ought to be working together. If a man is making you uncomfortable, tell a man you know and trust. If you see another woman and recognize, from your experience, that she is afraid, help a man you know and trust understand what is going on and ask him to help her. Then back him up, especially if other women question why he is intruding -- tell them why you asked him to help. Defend the principle that it might be OK to ask a man for help with another man, that it isn't an affront to women's rights to have friendships with men who will defend them and help them enjoy the freedom to move and live as they wish. Say that they are being good men, and requite their defense of women with a defense of them.

There is a section of links on the sidebar called "Frith & Freedom," which includes debates about the role of friendship in making us free. This is the Old English word frith, which is related to the root word for freedom. The idea was that the world is dangerous, full of natural forces and enemies alike. To live a free and worthy life, we needed friends who would fight for us and for whom we would bear friendship in return. This is how a free life, a good life, becomes possible in a hostile world.

Democracy in the Age of Obama

Asking the right questions is important, says Cold Fury. He links to what he takes to be one of the right questions, from Human Events:

Where do we go to vote against the Commissar of Undesirable Businesses, if we decide we disagree with his or her judgments… once we penetrate the veil of secrecy and discover those judgments have been rendered?

No one’s even pretending DOJ had anything resembling the authority to do this.

Another of the right questions, then: "So what?" Is there any mechanism of accountability or consequence?

Well, there's an election in several months, and another one in two years. If you win both of them, you could move to impeach the President right after his term will already be over.

Paranoia in the Age of Obama

UPS is loudly insisting that it is not helping the NSA interdict packages containing computer equipment in order to install backdoor spying equipment, as is Cisco. What an absurd and paranoid thought! Why would anyone think they were doing such a thing anyway?

After Glenn Greenwald's book came out last week, one of the big stories was the additional revelations about the NSA's interdiction program -- in which the NSA grabs packages of computer equipment that are being shipped, outfits the equipment with backdoors -- and sends them along their shipping route as if nothing happened. Most famously, it included an image of it happening, showing a clear Cisco box[.]

Oh.

A Slight Delta

A comparison of the enthusiasm of West Point cadets in welcoming a Presidential speaker, the examples being this week's speech and President Bush's last speech. The ones who count are the people in the gray uniforms, though it turns out the civilian audience wasn't much more enthusiastic this week.

Reviews of the speech in the press have been terrible, but the ones I'm getting in email are vastly worse. The left hand limit on commentary for this speech is that it missed a significant opportunity to accomplish anything of moment. The right hand limit is that it will produce a rapid destabilization of American alliances, especially in Asia.

Time Passes On

Hot Air mocks Shinseki's claims to be serious about VA reform now, after five years on the job.

But hey, after six years of 'unexpectedly' slow growth, and endless White House 'pivots' to the economy as its top issue, that same economy is back in contraction. So really, we're right where we should expect to be.

Those of you who are veterans (or have a very high tolerance for salty language and bloody-minded humor) might want to watch the RangerUp video on the VA. (Bonus: the Wicked Witch of Westboro!)



RU says about this today:

When we launched our VA Damn Few episode, some people said it was too harsh. In light of the IG determining that they were, in fact, pretending vets didn't exist, this makes this episode that much better (and worse). Watch it now or the VA will ignore the problem and not even fire the guy that is in charge of this whole mess! (oh wait)

Sometimes it's hard to be too harsh.

Doctors without competition

When you take away the profit motive, you don't get altruism, you get non-monetary self-interested incentives.  Unfortunately, there's no reason to suppose that the alternative incentives lead to improvement in performance.  The point isn't profit or non-profit, it's whether customers have choices.

From a doctor's OpEd in the WSJ today:

In my experience, the best thing that a patient in the VA system could hope for was that the services he needed were unavailable.  When that is the case, the VA outsources their care to doctors in the community, where their problems are promptly addressed.  But these patients still need to return to the VA system for other services and get back on a long waiting list.

The VA vs. the NHS

Will things improve if Obamacare enthusiasts get their wish and parlay the law's spectacular failure into what they wanted from the beginning, which is single-payer?  Charles Cooke describes the future in the form of what the NHS already is in Britain:

Because mistakes in delivering health care are catastrophic for those seeking reelection or trying to push an agenda, politicians in Britain spend the vast majority of their time worrying about perceived rather than actual improvement.  Government, by definition, has no competition, which means that those who staff it can lie and spin and cover up mistakes not just with impunity but with the full force of the state at their back.  Thus do results become less important than statistics, reforms less important than spending, and patients less important than careers.  Dishonesty is widespread.  Per the Telegraph, the British National Audit Office discovered in 2013 that

one in four hospitals is recording false waiting list times, with patients waiting on average three weeks longer than NHS records show.

Patients groups have said the findings were “scandalous,” and that hospital managers had been able to routinely fiddle figures so they could claim to be hitting Government waiting time targets, when patients were enduring far longer waits for care. 

Sound familiar?

Obviously people can lie to their customers whether they're in the private or the public sector.  The problem is enormously more difficult to handle, though, when the customers are stuck with a single provider in a state-protected monopoly.

Texas is the Alamo

Bill Whittle on how the Tea Party thrives in Texas, if nowhere else. Tea Party candidates swept the primary runoffs yesterday.

Legacies

From Andrew Klavan:

Now, we don’t want to dwell on the distant past when Democrats defended slavery against Abe Lincoln and his Republicans… or when they formed the Ku Klux Klan or passed oppressive Jim Crow laws… or when Democrats like Al Gore Sr. or Robert Byrd… or George Wallace or Lester Maddox… or Bill Clinton’s mentor J. William Fulbright… stood as staunch segregationists.

The modern Democratic party is much different. Appalled by the way evil slavemasters once tore black families apart, Democrats fashioned welfare to subsidize unmarried motherhood so that free African Americans could tear their families apart themselves.

Just make the Potemkin village bigger

People stuck in a monopoly (unexpectedly!) find that service is terrible:

So far, the VA affair is running the usual course of Obama administration scandals, with the requisite denial and lack of accountability.  VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has referred to the incidents as “isolated cases” (even though 26 facilities are now under investigation).  No one has been fired.  One of Shinseki’s deputies, Dr. Robert Petzel, resigned, but was scheduled to retire this year anyway.  It was an appropriately Potemkin departure in a scandal involving Potemkin waiting lists. 

The White House has reverted to its default position of maintaining that it doesn’t know much about what’s happening in the vast government it always wants to make bigger.

It's pretty much like the public schools:  until they're credibly threatened with the ability of their customers to go elsewhere and take their funding with them, no amount of money will make them deliver good service, let alone good service at a reasonable cost.

The Gibson Raid

Forbes has an article that claims the Federal raid on Gibson Guitars was in service to a labor union with whom the company was having a dispute. The raid was highly aggressive:

“What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”

While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.

Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong.

Why would you seal a warrant in a raid of this kind? There's no national security interest. Citizens should ordinarily have a right to see the warrant, for one thing so they can verify that it is lawfully executed and that the police have a right to do what they are doing. (For another, to make sure the cops are at the right address.)

It also helps you construct a defense. What if the warrant remains sealed as you await trial, so you can't really know just why you are under threat of jail?

In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group....

With no clear legal standards, a sealed warrant the company has not been allowed to see too this day, no formal charges filed, and the threat of a prison term hanging over any executive who does not take “due care” to abide by this absurdly vague law, Gibson settled. “You’re fighting a very well organized political machine in the unions,” Juszkiewicz concluded. “And the conservation guys have sort of gone along.” Hey, what’s not to like about $50,000?"

As the article points out, 95% of cases brought by the Feds never go to trial, because the prosecutors set the charges at such a level that a plea deal is the only rational choice. Fifty grand as a payoff to an environmental group, and you can go home and get back to making guitars. Go to trial, and we'll do our best to put you in prison for decades.

Mourning in the Hall

Today my uncle died, following complications resulting from brain surgery. He was a great man solely because he was a good man, and that is quite an achievement.

When he was young, in East Tennessee, he looked like Elvis at a time when that was desirable. My mother, his younger sister, told me once how she was always popular as a young girl because all the other girls wanted to have a reason to come visit the girl whose brother looked like Elvis.

He married young -- too young for his own mother's liking! A few years ago I attended my cousin's wedding, his granddaughter, and the band called for a dance only for married couples. As the song progressed, they began to name off years: one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty. The idea was that, as they gave the length of time you had been married, you would leave the floor. He and his wife were dancing at the very last but for one couple in their nineties.

He owned a small business in civil engineering, and by means of it raised a family. Twice at least his honest nature caused him to be defrauded by people he had elected to trust, but he stood good for all the debts they had run up in his name.

For the entire part of his life that I knew him, he was a deacon in his church. He lived according to the strict rule of Southern Baptists, which he was, not drinking nor smoking nor chasing after girls. He made one exception I can recall, allowing a keg onto his property to celebrate his son's graduation from college. He was invariably kind, and almost invariably full of a gentle good humor.

He is survived by his wife, two children, four grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren -- I am not sure of the number myself.

We will miss him.

Better suspension

In God We Trust: Everybody Else, Cash Only

Dad29 suggests that the DOJ aims to destroy the ability of ammunition manufacturers, among 30 types of worrisome businesses, to operate except on a cash-only basis. That's surprising if the goal is, as the DOJ says it is, better oversight of these allegedly-worrisome industries. Generally electronic transactions leave better records. The reason to force banks to stop dealing with them can't, then, be that it would enable better oversight.

It might be a desire to destroy the business, or the industry.

UPDATE: The Sage of Knoxville on the same topic. For some reason he prefers to describe it in terms of a war on pornography, though he notes that 30 different types of businesses are being targeted. (Perhaps he thinks that Americans won't care about ammunition sales in the same way they care about access to porn.)

Memorial Day

I spent the day with family, walking a battlefield and trying both to learn and to teach something about how we came to where we are.

It is a solemn day. I trust you all spent it well.

Low humor

Never mind the cause, we need a remedy!

Sheldon Richman expresses a grudging admiration for the staying power of Keynesian economics.   One explanation is that Hayek et al. made people feel gloomy, with their insistence that misallocations of resources had to work themselves out before the economy could return to health.  Who wants to wait for that to happen?  We need jobs now!

Rather than getting bogged down in an attempt to explain the dynamics of the business cycle—a subject that remains contentious to this day—Keynes focused on a question that could be answered.  And that was also the question that most needed an answer: given that overall demand is depressed—never mind why—how can we create more employment? 

Indeed, if you’re trying to end mass unemployment, why would you want to get bogged down trying to understand what actually caused the mass unemployment?  It’s not as though the cause could be expected to shed light on the remedy.

Enter the era of stimulus spending, which is always about to create sustainable jobs, if we just keep increasing it.  In some fields, unexpected results might lead us to rethink our theories of causation.  Well, not in education, or child-rearing, or climate science, of course, but there must still be some fields somewhere that remained tethered to reality on some level.

In which I agree with the President, for once

Shocking news:  I don't think the President's proposal for a ratings system for universities is lunacy:

The rating system, which the president called for in a speech last year and is under development, would compare schools on factors like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate and how much money their students earn after graduating.  Ultimately, Mr. Obama wants Congress to agree to use the ratings to allocate the billions in federal student loans and grants.  Schools that earn a high rating on the government’s list would be able to offer more student aid than schools at the bottom. 

Many college presidents said a rating system like the one being considered at the White House would elevate financial concerns above academic ones and would punish schools with liberal arts programs and large numbers of students who major in programs like theater arts, social work or education, disciplines that do not typically lead to lucrative jobs.

This controversy will get derailed into the usual complaints that education is too ineffable to judge accurately, but that misses the point.  The ratings system is designed to help people decide whether the federal government should subsidize tuition.  No matter how ineffably fabulous a basket-weaving studies degree is (and it would appeal to me enormously), the federal subsidies should be tied in some rational way to an increased ability to earn a living.  Cold and bourgeois of me, I know.  But when you look at a university's rating in that light, it's no mystery how to craft it, and no need to confuse the result with whatever personal views one may hold about the abstract value of education.

How did we get to the point where we worry that a system for deciding how to allocate federal subsidies elevated financial concerns inappropriately?

A break for warmth

From Bookworm Room, two happy-making videos.  One is about inclusion:  not the kind where you pretend everyone is alike, but the kind where you take your blinders off, find out what people can do instead of what you expected they could do, make a place for it, and honor them for it.  The other is about what the Bible might call the "widow's mite":  gifts from the heart, with no strings attached or guilt invoked.

Feedback plus-or-minus

This link is to an interesting comment at Watts Up With That analyzing the difficulty of deciding whether the interaction of CO2 (a weak greenhouse gas) with water vapor (a much stronger greenhouse gas) produces a negative feedback loop, which would tend toward equilibrium, or a positive feedback loop, which would spiral into permanent warming.  The question is fraught, because water vapor can serve either to warm the atmosphere, via the greenhouse effect, or to cool it, via other well-observed mechanisms.  When all the dust settles, how do these effects net out?

All alarmist climastrology in recent decades has depended on climate models that assume a net positive sign on the "feedback" or "sensitivity" factor; most of the quarreling has been over the size of the factor, especially since the past 17 years of little or no warning have demonstrated that the factor has been grossly overestimated.  In fact, however, there's scant evidence one way or the other on the more fundamental question of whether the feedback is negative or positive.  No amount of tinkering with the exact size of the positive feedback factor will help the models' ability to predict real experience if the problem really is that the feedback is negative.

Overcoming Barriers

The Wilson Quarterly has an article on economic development, relative to our recent discussion of reparations in several ways. The most obvious is this:

Geography, however, doesn’t always play a direct role—sometimes its effects are more roundabout. Rugged, mountainous terrain isn’t great for growing crops or conducting trade, but one study from 2007 found that such regions in Africa nonetheless reached higher levels of development. Why? Because historically, that same treacherous landscape protected certain areas from slave traders.

So if the most successful regions of Africa are the least well-endowed, just because it was too hard for slavers to extract their wealth and human capital, how much of Africa's suffering is directly due to the slave trade?

But there's this, too:

Other studies have shown that people matter more than institutions or locations. Many poorly endowed lands have experienced a “reversal of fortune” since 1500, producing more income per capita than their past would have suggested. Those economies benefited from the European colonizers and their human capital—a familiarity with centralized state institutions, efficient agriculture techniques, and new technologies that let one generation build upon the advances of the last.

Now that seems to be a reversal of the first argument: Europeans colonized the parts of Africa that are worst-performing, too. I assume this is a way of talking about India, which wasn't subject to the slave trade and thus wasn't plundered in the same way. But India and Pakistan sit next door to one another, and were subject to the same British rule. There's an element of responsibility that goes beyond "what did the Europeans do to them?" and lies at the question of what they have done with their inheritance.

The piece ends on a note of hope, which is where I think we should aspire to go as well. The question shouldn't be one of punishment or vengeance, but of development of human capacities. We want people to come to flourish.

The Black Monster of Santa Barbara

It is no shame to die for love. It has been the mark of many a noble death. It need not be a shame to kill for love, though it often is, but there are times when it can be right.

The Lily Maid of Astolat begged Lancelot to love her, to marry her or -- if he would not -- at least to take her as paramour. He would do neither, the one for the love of Guinevere and the other out of respect for her virtue. She took herself to her bed and died, but revenged herself on him by having her body brought to Camelot with a letter complaining that he had refused her love. It is a bitter story and a sad one, but a better story than today's.

Elaine understood that her complaint, though the sorrow of it brought her to her death, imposed no duty on Lancelot. He might be ashamed to have caused her such pain, when she had done him only good. But his defense was valid, as Camelot agreed:

And when Sir Launcelot heard it word by word, he said: My lord Arthur, wit ye well I am right heavy of the death of this fair damosel: God knoweth I was never causer of her death by my willing, and that will I report me to her own brother: here he is, Sir Lavaine. I will not say nay, said Sir Launcelot, but that she was both fair and good, and much I was beholden unto her, but she loved me out of measure.

Ye might have shewed her, said the queen, some bounty and gentleness that might have preserved her life.

Madam, said Sir Launcelot, she would none other ways be answered but that she would be my wife, outher else my paramour; and of these two I would not grant her, but I proffered her, for her good love that she shewed me, a thousand pound yearly to her, and to her heirs, and to wed any manner knight that she could find best to love in her heart. For madam, said Sir Launcelot, I love not to be constrained to love; for love must arise of the heart, and not by no constraint.

That is truth, said the king.

Rewarding failure

Why and how an institution gets money directed to it may be more important than how much it gets.  This morning's Wall Street Journal article argues that the VA has gotten all the money it ever asked for, and yet it's failing.  The same disturbing pattern afflicts public school financing, which increases endlessly even as its results deteriorate. Paul Krugman argues that freeing the V.A. from the "perverse incentives" of "profit" should be a great thing, but Daniel Greenfield points out his lunacy:

“Crucially, the V.H.A. is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it,” Krugman wrote.  “So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.” 

Of course ‘perverse’ profit motive incentives don’t go away.  They just morph into targets that have to be met at any cost.  A quick look at anything from Soviet agriculture to No Child Left Behind would show how that works. 

Krugman was either being dishonest or remaining steadfastly ignorant of how the world works.  And the VA met its targets and budget issues by rationing health care and killing patients. 

The way socialized medicine always does.

Or, frankly, any monopoly that manages to disconnect its funding from its performance by exempting itself from the rigors of competition and therefore from the discipline of consequences of failure.

"The more you tighten your grip . . ."

". . . Lord Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  This might be a good message for the author of "When Sprawl Hits the Wall," a piece in Urbanophile bemoaning the "doughnut" syndrome around dying cities.  Indianapolis, he claims, enacted a brilliant strategy of co-opting its suburbs some decades back.  You can't let those people move out to the outskirts without expanding your perimeter and trapping them in your tax-base, right?  But then the suburbs themselves inexplicably decay, too, which evidently has nothing whatever to do with their having been trapped in your crazy urban scheme to begin with.  Then new suburbs spring up even further out and, dang it, the people with all the money and resources insist on living there instead of in your demonstrably superior urban paradise.  Sometimes they even move to a completely new city or state.

The problem continues to be that choice thingy.

On Reparations

There's been some talk about this essay in the Atlantic, which makes an extended case for reparations from the perspective of the harm done to black Americans over several centuries. (A rebuttal from the National Review is here.) We should consider it, because I think the case is even stronger than the author makes it.

The strengthening element comes at the union of two points he does make, which I will quote. The first one is about the way in which black slaves were increasingly subject to an emerging racism:

When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.

One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.

Indeed it is no wonder that poor whites and blacks found themselves in a similar case in 1619, because racial theory in general did not exist at that time. The Wikipedia article on the subject alleges some 'classical' theories, but comes up with two very minor examples; and the choice of the word 'race' is the translator's, not the original author's. (The Latin is "gentium.") That different peoples are different is not news, but the idea that there was some sort of quasi-species difference is not an ancient concept.

It is certainly not a Medieval concept. The distinction that interested them most was not biological but religious. Indeed European society during the Middle Ages was much more diverse ethnically than we realize today without careful effort, largely because they themselves didn't make a big deal about it. Likewise in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the hero's father's first wife is a black African princess. His half brother is half-black (literally, in the novel: half his skin is black and half white, in patches). The marriage isn't considered illegitimate because of the difference in skin color, but because the wife was of a pagan faith and Parzival's father was a Christian. Meanwhile, when he and his half-brother meet, they meet as equals and treat each other with great joy. That is not to say that there were never Medieval remarks about those differently-colored foreigners that were disparaging: the Jewish philosopher Maimonides makes some very vicious ones in his famous work Guide for the Perplexed. But there was no sense of this concept of "race."

The invention of racism in the Enlightenment is "early" during the life of Robert Boyle, who was not born until 1627. The concept was not well accepted even in his day. Three of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment did much to change that: Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel. (Kant, who advocated so strongly for universal rights coming from internal rational nature, is the most surprising name on this list; but nevertheless, as philosopher Charles Mills points out, he made a complete commitment).

So there was a move in philosophy, including natural philosophy -- father of the sciences -- toward racism. The sciences became enthusiastically embraced on this point by culture, politics, government, and art. Why? Because it provided slave owners with white support to help them suppress the danger of rebellion from a black population that greatly outnumbered them (as historian Kenneth S. Greenberg demonstrates), while also providing a justification for the generation of the greatest wealth in human history to that era.

In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”

The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

This telling dramatically understates the importance of slavery to the Industrial Revolution. Historian Eric Williams famously declared that the British participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade underwrote the entire industrial program. American slave shipping followed the same model, developing a variation of the "Triangular Trade" that had funded the development of British industry. Based in the Northeast, it shipped rum to Africa to trade for slaves, slaves to the Carribean to trade for sugar cane, and sugar cane to New England to make into rum.

The American South was not much involved in that trade because it was involved in the British triangle, which took cotton to its mills to make into textiles, traded the textiles for slaves, and the slaves for cotton. It was not until the American Civil War that the South was brought into the North's economic system, as the northern American states had developed cotton mills of their own, and the blockade closed the South to British shipping for years, forcing the British to turn to India for cotton -- a change that was never undone, once it had finally been made. As a consequence, the market for Southern cotton after the war was in the North. The huge "gilded age" boom of industry was funded first by the slave trade, then by slavery, then by the oppressive systems of sharecropping and Jim Crow. Thus was there money to build factories and railroads!

The Atlantic piece makes much, rightly, of the suffering that attended sharecroppers under this new system. What the author misses is that this affliction was not entirely race-based. The intense racism was wielded as a way of keeping Southern poor whites -- who once again had very much in common with poor blacks -- on the side of the system run by the elite in places like Atlanta, capital of the "New South," which made business ties to New York its guiding light. Jim Crow was not just to keep blacks down, but to keep the poor divided and distrustful of each other. Official, government-enforced racism intensified during this era because it was the only thing holding the system together, as grinding poverty worsened every year under the law of monoculture: every year cotton production must go up, which means that -- supply and demand -- the price per bale came down. Until the Boll Wevil destroyed the crops three years running in the late 1920s, nothing got better in the South.

What all that means for reparations I couldn't say. The proposal is to study the issue. It's worth studying. It's worth understanding.

Off-road thinking

More on graphene:  How a greater fear of being boring than of being wrong led to levitating frogs and a Nobel prize.

Genes and culture

Reading half a dozen reviews of Nicholas Wade's new book "A Troublesome Inheritance" had almost reduced me to despair of ever finding one that didn't get stuck in the long-running "tastes great, less filling" quarrel between nature and nurture, or in sterile quibbles over whether the word "race" has any meaning.  (I can't say for sure when red becomes orange and orange becomes yellow, but I know that colors can be usefully distinguished.)

This New York Books review, amusingly entitled "Stretch Genes," avoids the usual excitable excesses.  Wade's book sounds like an interesting romp through theories about how traits like willingness to trust non-kin, or ability to delay gratification, can profoundly affect the structure of civilization.  It also sounds like an inexplicable effort to attribute to genes a number of global differences that could as easily be attributed to culture.  Wade looks, for instance, at the hesitance of some Southeast Asian cultures to adopt successful strategies from Chinese immigrants.  If it were only a matter of culture, he wonders, why wouldn't people readily adopt the new strategy as soon as they observe its success?  It must be genetic.  Or . . . could there maybe be some huge non-genetic hurdles to adults' ditching one culture and adopting another that seems to offer an advantage in one sliver of life?

There are fascinating studies involving identical twins separated at birth.  They are almost the only line of inquiry that I find persuasive on the knotty problems of disentangling nature from nurture.

Altamont

Two concerts stand at the very core of the Boomer mythos, Woodstock and Altamont. The one was good, the other evil. Woodstock was -- in spite of mud and hardships -- a festival of love and the new way of thinking. Altamont somehow became tainted, and the source of the darkness was pinned on the violence of the Hells Angels.

The matter is of interest because a new feature about them, which 'of course' will address the concert. The initial press is not encouraging.

Of course, the project will include the 1969 Altamont concert in Northern California where the Hells Angels provided a barrier to make sure that the crowd didn’t come onto the stage when the Rolling Stones played. As the story goes, their “payment” was in beer. The Angels got into brawls with the fans and a pregnant woman ended up with a skull fracture and another young man was stabbed to death. It was total chaos. After that, the Hells Angels were persona non grata, and public opinion about the club changed for the worse.

The woman was hit by a beer bottle thrown from the crowd, not by the Angels.

As for the other matter: 'A young man was stabbed to death.' True, as far as it goes.

Here's a documentary on the matter.



The young man in question had been thrown out of the concert for trying to climb onto the stage. He went somewhere and obtained a revolver, returned, drew the gun, and charged the stage again.

Another story built into the mind of the Boomer generation is the assassination of John Lennon. The Hells Angels stopped a similar attack on the Rolling Stones, perhaps the only band of equal stature to the Beatles.

The Angel who saved the Rolling Stones did it without shooting into the crowd, without hurting anyone else, and by charging a gun with a blade.

That's not bad. The failure to understand what they had seen right in front of their eyes was not the first such failure. We are still today living with the consequences of many other failures by just the same people, of just the same kind.

Hah!

'And then it hit me! By which I mean, my wife pointed it out.'

I wonder how much this insight applies to the one show -- which, like most television, I haven't seen at all -- and how much it is a barometer for the current society.

Confer:

Cyber(non)security

Well, this is encouraging.

Live by the Viral, Die by the Viral

One of the key problems in American foreign policy is always the maintenance of political will among the American people. It's hard to sustain a long-term and difficult operation if the American people's interest in or support for it wavers; harder still if the opposition party is actively undermining you.

It turns out a particular problem with the use of social media as the forefront of your diplomacy is that, on the Internet, interest wanders quickly.

Intellectual disarmament

Here's an exceedingly odd article in Foreign Policy about the accelerating collapse of Libya, because Republicans.  What I apparently didn't understand before is that the purpose of a Congressional investigative committee is not to look into malfeasance by United States officials but to solve Libya's internal problems.  The author sputters with outrage that Republicans in Congress have obsessed about the President's "bungled communications" about Benghazi rather than about how to transform Libya into a paradise without committing either treasure or blood.  That turns out to be the proper task of the opposition party rather than, say, the White House or the State Department.  Here are the helpful ideas of the State Department, by the way:

"Libya has many challenges, and we're aware of that," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday.  "We believe they cannot be overcome if its leaders don't settle differences through dialogue and work together." 

Last week, in London, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged to do "all we can to help the Libyans" solve their political problems. "We need to try to accelerate the effort to bring about stability and security and the governance that is necessary to provide the time and the space for Libyan authorities to be able to confront the threat from extremism and the challenges that their country faces of just providing governance to their people. . . ." 

But it seems the problem wasn't the flabby emptiness of these sentiments; it was Congress's inexplicable refusal to provide "resources":

With the hours upon hours of hearings dedicated to Benghazi, very little of that time focused on how Congress could help provide the resources the administration might need to improve the situation in Libya.  The fact that this isn't likely to change bodes poorly for the country's future.

The article mentions the administration's alert readiness to evacuate the Libyan embassy as soon as things go from desperate to nightmarish this time.  (Not gonna make that mistake twice!)  Imagine the morale in that embassy.  "Yes, this cesspool of a country's blowing up, and I can't imagine what professional sins I must have committed to have been assigned here, but I take comfort in knowing that Washington has my back."

Hwæt!

Tolkien's Beowulf is out today.

Two True Things From The FBI

The FBI has issued a couple of interesting statements lately: worries about concentrated government power, and a confession of defeat in the War on Drugs.

It would be nice to hear more frankness like this. Well done.

A Debate For Our Times

The truth about the National Democratic Party: Communist or Sith?

Clue bat

The president boasted that wait-times at the VA have been slashed by 50% in the last year.

But wait, wasn't there some kind of scandal about fudged wait times?  Maybe he hasn't heard about it yet.

I shouldn't blame him too much.  Most of the coverage I've seen lately is depressingly confused, focusing on the wait-times themselves instead of the fraudulent coverup.  The wait-times have been with us for a long time and are unlikely to be fixed as long as we're moving in the direction of socialized medicine instead of away from it; they're also an extremely comfortable issue for the current administration, being one of its many "inherited" problems.  The current scandal is, or should be, about the fraud, the coverup, and the President's refusal even to acknowledge it, let alone to effect a remedy.

Even though, as he says, "That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want."  You've got a telephone and a fountain pen, Mr. President.  How about putting your tush in gear to solve a purely executive-department problem?  You may not be able to supply decent medical care to vets (or at least, not until you reform your philosophy), but you can sure address fraud in your own ranks.  It might even be easy to get the voters and Congress behind a solution if the problem isn't deliberately buried.

Books, Covers

Sometimes judgment may be legitimate.

The Quest for Bannockburn

In the run-up to the celebrations attending the 700th anniversary -- 23 June, remember -- BBC Two has put together a fairly neat short history. If you aren't fully familiar with the Bannockburn, you could do worse than to look it over.

Price-fixing, Part . . . oh, I forget

Health insurance rates too high in California?  No problem, we'll respond just as we did to unruly prices on other necessities.  Remember the fabulous success of California's artificial "market" for energy prices?  Me, too:  most of my work starting in 2001 arose out of the nationwide wave of electrical power generator bankruptcies that began with Pacific Gas & Electric, a business failure caused 100% by barking-mad state power utility regulators who thought they could repeal the law of supply and demand with a regulatory wand.  Regulators never dreamed that micromanaging PG&E's business would lead to brownouts.  It worked for the Soviet Union, right?

The more critical a product is, the worse idea it is to jack with its market.  Price caps mean crashed supply and stymied innovation, last time, this time, and every time.

"There Is No More Molly"

Mark Steyn remarks on the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of cartoonist Molly Norris:

[Four years ago]

You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"?

[Today]

Because of the Muslim death threats, Molly Norris, who started the event, had to go into hiding and change her name. She disappeared completely and nobody knows whether she is dead or alive.

The latter quote is from an article about the "Draw Mohammed Day," which was the event she started. This year it was shut down by Toronto police.

Against Rutgers

P. J. O'Rourke has posted a spirited defense of Madame Rice, a harsh indictment of Rutgers' institutional culture and college education generally, and a reminder of an excellent poem that I hadn't read in many years. Indeed, I had forgotten the poet -- not the poem itself, but for some reason I thought it was Thoreau's work, and not Robert Frost's.

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

"Elves" is not a bad explanation, after all.

A Day of Civic Duty

Today I both voted and, shortly thereafter, donated blood to the Red Cross. Tonight we'll have the exciting tabulation of the winners and losers, and see how the general election will shape up.

I went with Todd Robinson over Michelle Nunn not out of any strong sense that she was a bad candidate, but just for the reason most people will vote for her: her father was Sam Nunn, a man I greatly respect. On reflection, though her career in charitable organizations is worthy of respect, the real reason she's the out-front favorite is just because she comes from a famous family and has a famous name. Robinson has earned the respect he has all by himself, as for example when he served with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.

In a way that's unfair to Ms. Nunn, who isn't at fault for having famous parents, nor for coming of age at the same time that Jimmy Carter's grandson is going to be a candidate for governor, or at the same time that we've recently had two Bushes and two Clintons as serious contenders for President (and a third Bush on the way, according to reports). Of course we have had the Kennedys for years, and of course every President we've ever had has been kin to George Washington.

Nevertheless, I believe that if there is a natural aristocracy, it must be an aristocracy not of blood but of virtue. We should look for the ones who have earned it. I have no doubt that Mr. Robinson will say, at his victory or his concession speech, that he owes everything to his family. In a way he will be right, but not in the same way. Doubtless he owes them a great deal, but not a direct ascension to the top of the ticket; doubtless he couldn't have done it without them, but it was him all alone there in the mud and the night.

UPDATE: With 2% of results in, NBC already feels safe calling it for Michelle Nunn.

Battle of the Nations: Good Parts Version

Well, "best parts version," but that loses the reference.



That Ukrainian in the beginning may have had an unfair advantage in terms of real-world experience.

Foreign Cars Do Sometimes Resemble Trolls

[A]round 7 a.m. as she drove her red BMW by the intersection of Southeast 7th and Morrison.... A man dressed in chain-mail with a helmet, shield and carrying a sword and staff ran into traffic and started attacking her car.

Apparently she called the police and reported that "a pirate" was attacking her. A gross mis-identification!

Pointing the gun turrets in

States are operating under an unfair disadvantage.  Companies are voting with their feet, moving in large numbers from California to Texas and in lesser numbers from New York to just about anywhere with more reasonable gun-control and right-to-work laws.  What's a state to do?

Foreign countries showed us the solution a long time ago:  the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea made the border more secure.  That is, secure not only in the sense of controlling immigration, but in the even more important sense of stopping those terrible rich people from leaving in disgust.  California and New York don't have the power to shake down emigrants at the border, though California has toyed with the idea.  In contrast, the U.S. federal government is quite prepared to give it a try.

That's the ticket:  Never influence economic behavior by persuasion, or by applying incentives out of your own pocket, when you can do it by force.

Debate, equal sign, over

Klavan:

The time for talking is past. The experts have reached a consensus. We’ve come too far to go back now. The people have decided. The toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re not going to return to the bad old days. Sure, there are some who insist on being anti-science. There are people who are still clinging to their Bibles and their guns. I don’t know why they’re working so hard to keep folks from having health insurance. They want to put y’all back in chains. They want to put women in binders.

Stop me before I buy or sell again!

Two good articles about the market.  First, the healing powers of the minimum wage:

So let’s break down what she does for her $8 an hour.  She says “may I help you” to a customer, a customer gives her their order which she enters via a touchpad computer.  The computer computes and totals the order.  She enters the amount of cash tendered and it tells he how much change to give back.  Or she swipes a credit card, waits for the receipt to print and hands both back to the customer.  At some point after that, she hands the customer a tray with food on it or a bag containing it. 

Guess what else can do most of that?

Second,  Harry Binswanger confesses his guilt for playing a part in "market failure":

You see, a "market" is the interaction of individuals, buying and selling.  A market trade is distinguished from seizing goods by force.  In the supermarket, I trade my dollars for the items I take from the shelf.  That's, as the name says, a market.  If I just grabbed stuff from the shelves and ran out the door with it, hoping to evade capture, that would not be "the market" operating but theft. . . .

. . . When people like me are left free to make our own decisions, we screw up. We create chaos. We can't be trusted with freedom. That's when the government has to come in to clean up the mess.

The heartbreak of GMO food

Oh, come on.  Who wouldn't want to grow this?

The Elise Situation

I waited for a few days to comment on this, in the hope she might change her mind. Cass has shut down a few times, and come back on second or third thought. Elise seems determined to deprive us of her insights.

I’d also like to thank Cassandra over at Villainous Company for encouraging me early on: You made a world of difference to me, Cass. And I’d like to thank both Villainous Company and Grim’s Hall for taking me seriously as a blogger and for making me feel welcome as a commenter; I’ll be stopping by from time to time.

You're welcome. If you want to post here from time to time, just once every few months or years as interests you, let me know. We've been glad to have your company, myself especially.

Public Pianos

A great idea, if the guy who stops by to play it is this guy.

Context

I'm not sure when it happened, but I noticed several years ago that every damaging admission from a leftist was explained as having been "taken out of context."  (I'm open to correction here; maybe I don't notice it when right-wingers do the same thing.)  (But see "Gaslighting.")  The primary defense to the Climategate emails, for instance, was that some dozens of jaw-dropping admissions of the politicization of the peer review process were taken out of context.  Sure enough, when peer reviewers recently rejected a mildly skeptical climate paper on the ground that it would only provide ammunition for those terrible denialists, it wasn't surprising to learn the next day that their remarks had been taken out of context.

I confess, though, that reading their remarks in context hasn't much cleared things up.  The paper was rejected because it pointed out an inconsistency in an important recurring feature of climate models, which the reviewer considered a "false comparison" because rational people always understood that no consistency was to be expected on that point.  Sorry, not helping.

Mark Steyn is on the case, as usual, with a fine piece about the "Clime Syndicate," entitled "The Descent of Mann."  He has not, to put it mildly, reacted to the Michael Mann lawsuit by describing his adversary with more gentleness or caution.

The rejected paper put its finger on the sore spot: the unjustifiable assumption that CO2, a weak greenhouse gas, has suddenly become a greenhouse gas that dominates even its much stronger cousin, water vapor, because of what is often called "forcing" or "sensitivity," which means an assumption that there is a positive feedback loop that is causing greenhouse warming to spiral out of control.   There is no physical explanation of why a positive feedback loop should be present, when Nature abounds with far more examples of negative feedback loops tending to equilibrium.  The assumption that the feedback is positive is entirely inferred from historical data, then plugged into computer models to create predictions.  The problem is that the historical data don't particularly support the positive sign on the feedback loop:  at best they support widely varying estimates of its magnitude, and they can with equal rationality be seen to support a negative feedback loop.   Nor does a positive feedback loop assumption make for a predictive model that matches experimental data, particularly during the last inconvenient 17 years, which have seen an inexplicable pause in inevitable warming that is sure to be followed by the apocalypse.

Here are the peer reviewer's comments explaining why a paper pointing out problems with various models' feedback assumptions would be "unhelpful":

COMMENTS TO THE AUTHOR(S) 

The manuscript . . . test[s] the consistency between three recent "assessments" of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity . . . . The study finds significant differences between the three assessments and also finds that the independent assessments of forcing and climate sensitivity within AR5 are not consistent if one assumes the simple energy balance model to be a perfect description of reality. . . . . The finding of differences between the three "assessments" and within the assessments . . . are reported as apparent inconsistencies. The paper does not make any significant attempt at explaining or understanding the differences, it rather puts out a very simplistic negative message giving at least the implicit impression of "errors" being made within and between these assessments . . . . Summarising, the simplistic comparison of [forcing ranges] . . ., combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side. One cannot and should not simply interpret the IPCCs ranges for AR4 or 5 as confidence intervals or pdfs and hence they are not directly comparable to observation based intervals (as e.g. in Otto et al). In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.

Oh. Well, all right, then. The silly author expected a nice fit between observational studies and models. Can't be printing unfair criticism like that! Especially if he's some kind of wet-behind-the-ears arriviste or a well-known looney denialist:

For a decade, [the author] was director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology. For another decade, he was Director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.  He's won the Descartes Prize, and a World Meteorological Organization prize for groundbreaking research in numerical weather prediction.  Over the years, he and Michael Mann have collaborated on scientific conferences.

That's what peer review is for:  to elevate the tone.

Apostates

Liberals exaggerate "much" more, says the study -- meaning that many don't really believe at all.

“I think there’s absolutely a level among liberals of not wanting to be defined by their lack of belief,” says Wear. “But there’s also an element of wanting to hold on to the spiritual benefits or comfort of theological beliefs that come with religion, while not wanting to be associated with a lot of the public implications of faith, including social issues.”

One wonders why, in this society, more tolerant of unbelief than ever before, and more tolerant than of any ancient.

Nor are we intolerant of questioning. Does not The Ballad of the White Horse say:

But Mark was come of the glittering towns
Where hot white details show,
Where men can number and expound,
And his faith grew in a hard ground
Of doubt and reason and falsehood found,
Where no faith else could grow.

Belief that grew of all beliefs
One moment back was blown
And belief that stood on unbelief
Stood up iron and alone.

Why lie about something so intimate, in an age when you will confess your most intimate transgressions to the crowd?

Stop calling them rolling coffins

For reasons I cannot fathom, GM included a PowerPoint presentation in its recall agreement with federal safety regulators that included instructions on how to speak like a weaselly lawyer when discussing the stuff we used to call safety defects, n/k/a items that do not perform to design.  For reasons I cannot fathom even more, someone seems to have combed through actual employee emails to make a list of particularly unhelpful expressions, and quoted them in this soon-to-be-made-public document.  Terms to avoid include:

“Kevorkianesque,” apparently a reference to Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who claimed to have helped more than 130 patients commit euthanasia, was one of the presentation’s “judgment words” to be avoided. Others included: “apocalyptic,” “Band-Aid,” “Challenger,” “Cobain,” “Corvair-like,” “death trap,” “decapitating,” “disemboweling,” “genocide,” “grenadelike,” “Hindenberg,” “impaling,” “rolling sacrophagus (tomb or coffin),” “spontaneous combustion,” “Titanic,” “widow-maker” or “words or phrases with biblical connotation."

I am not making this up.

Elementary

Did you ever get the feeling that Sherlock Holmes leaps to a conclusion or two?

All fixed at the V.A.

What's the count up to, now, seven different V.A. caught falsifying records to hide delays in treatment? But the powers that be are all over it, having demanded the resignation of a top official, Robert Petzel.  The administration is so all over it, in fact, that it announced Petzel's replacement several weeks ago, in light of Petzel's planned retirement later this year.

Friday night AMV

Kurosawa was never like this. Make sure you stay for the end.

Correlation vs. causation

Good graphs.

The bare and the clothed

Apropos of the dignified "Golden Buns" discussion taking place over at Cassandra's, a rueful ballad:



I went to see my doctor for my annual exam
Standing there in the buff, till suddenly he said, "Man!"
"What is it, doc? Some dread disease?  I have to know the score."
"No," he said, "You just don't look good naked any more."

"Darling, are you all right?"

. . . You seem a little confused.

Self-cooling electronics

The NPH, a heat-transfer engineer by training, directed me to this article about some surprising qualities of graphene.  Most matter follows a well-recognized law requiring that its heat-transfering properties remain constant regardless of its volume.  Graphene, in arrogant disregard of this law, gets better at transferring heat the bigger your sample is.  I have no idea why; the answer seems to have something to do with the rigid molecular structure, which transmits the heat "signal" without dissipating it very fast, and something to do with what the journalist is pleased to call "reduced dimensionality" (close-packing of molecules?).  It's like a reverse case of the "telephone game."

Anyway, apparently it's a big deal for the electrical engineers, who are always on the lookout for tiny bits of things that can do their work without overheating themselves and everyone around them.   Many of the amazing gadgets we take for granted these days are possible only because engineers found a way to perform tasks with tiny moving parts that didn't generate more heat than could be quickly and safely dissipated.

The NPH used to spend a lot of time, too, worrying about how hot some things could get in zero-gravity on the Space Station, where the "hot air rises" rule doesn't apply, which means air doesn't circulate the way we take for granted down here:  convection cooling doesn't happen without a lot of fans.  They say the fan noise got to be quite a problem on the Station, and of course the fan motors contribute to the heat problem themselves. On the Station's exterior, the problem was even more acute.  In vacuum, all you get is radiative transfer to dissipate the heat with, which isn't always easy if you're in sunlight or even reflected Earthlight.

Idaho Leads The Way

These are men of the people!



I'd vote for either of the guys with beards for a state-level office. I know exactly what they stand for, and just what they hope to accomplish if elected. There's no doubt that they want to hold the office for those purposes only, and not for self-enrichment.

Are they crazy? Well, most people are. They aren't lying to you, though. Besides, any elected office that's too scary to turn over to an ordinary crazy person is too powerful anyway.

Hashtag Diplomacy Works!

But as always, you can't have truly effective diplomacy without a robust military option.

In response to the new demands, Marine Corps Cyberspace Command unveiled a new Twitter task force of Marine Expeditionary Hashtaggers (MEH). “This is a whole new theater of warfare,” said MARFORCYBER spokesman Lt. Col. Brock Ruggedsson. “The Marines of the MEH will significantly impact world events 140 outraged characters at a time."

More on the subject here.

Pleading for Sodom

"Suppose there were fifty righteous people in the city; would you really sweep away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike! Far be it from you! Should not the judge of all the world do what is just?”

The LORD replied: If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.

Abraham spoke up again: “See how I am presuming to speak to my Lord, though I am only dust and ashes! What if there are five less than fifty righteous people? Will you destroy the whole city because of those five?” I will not destroy it, he answered, if I find forty-five there.

But Abraham persisted, saying, “What if only forty are found there?” He replied: I will refrain from doing it for the sake of the forty.

Then he said, “Do not let my Lord be angry if I go on. What if only thirty are found there?” He replied: I will refrain from doing it if I can find thirty there.

Abraham went on, “Since I have thus presumed to speak to my Lord, what if there are no more than twenty?” I will not destroy it, he answered, for the sake of the twenty.

But he persisted: “Please, do not let my Lord be angry if I speak up this last time. What if ten are found there?” For the sake of the ten, he replied, I will not destroy it.

-Genesis 18:24-32

I was thinking of this passage while reading Dan Henninger's piece on the closing of minds at some of America's elite academies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was told not to speak, though she is an atheist and a feminist, for she had slandered Islam. Christine Lagarde was told not to speak, though she is one of the world's most successful women and a leader of the International Monetary Fund, for the IMF has gone from being a leftist darling to falling under suspicion of "imperialist" leanings. Robert J. Birgeneau, who as Chancellor of Berkeley was one of the guiding stars of political correctness and a long-time advocate of gay marriage, he was told not to speak. Why? Because Berkeley's police used force to expel Occupy protesters.

Just as Sodom turned away from the righteousness of the Lord, these academies have turned away from the moral laws on which they were founded. Established as places of free speech and respectful inquiry, they have become dens of anger and oppression. Henninger explains how it began as a purge against conservatives in the academy, but now has come to consume even those who ought to be darlings of the left -- who have, indeed, been men and women of the left all their lives.

It will not take God to destroy an institution that leaves behind the good it was founded to achieve, and out of which its power grew. Their power depends upon their doing that good, for the sake of which good people donate money or pay taxes to support them, and send their children to be educated there. For a while these institutions may linger, while a few righteous remain to do the work that justified these institutions' economic and social support.

When the day comes that you 'can no longer find ten righteous people among them,' though, they will cease to be.

UPDATE: Via Lars Walker, apparently Science Fiction is now undergoing the same process.

Racist Sexist Fascist

[T]olerance, no, is not – it should not be a two-way street. It's a one-way street. You cannot say to someone that who you are is wrong, an abomination, is horrible, get a room, and all of those other things that people said about Michael Sam, and not be forced -- not forced, but not be made to understand that what you're saying and what you're doing is wrong.

But what you think is who you are. Doesn't that follow from your own ideology? You aren't your sex, or we're sexist. You aren't your race or the color of your skin, or we're racist. You're not your religion, because we are all free to criticize the tenets of our religion and take them as metaphorically as we want. You're not your upbringing for the same reason. You're certainly not bound by your physical 'gender.'

To be free, on the left-liberal reading, is to be free to self-determine. You are what you decide to be. That means you are what you think. You are what you choose to believe in.

Thus if one cannot say to someone that what they are is wrong, one cannot criticize thoughts or ideas once the thinker of those thoughts has identified with them. That follows logically from what has been said before.

This is a contradiction of the will. Willing this understanding of 'who we are' means that you can't say that "You can't say that who you are is wrong." It's madness. It's irrational. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Or are you a racist? A sexist? You've confessed to being a fascist.

The monkey on our backs

American healthcare consumers have a bad habit:  they want to have a choice of doctors and hospitals.  It's an impulse that needs to be crushed if the new day in cheap, universal healthcare is ever to dawn, according to experts interviewed by the New York Times:

“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group.  “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”

The Times coverage is interesting:  they seem to be getting just the least little bit skeptical of the brave new world. They even quote Monica Wehby, the doctor running for the Senate in Oregon on the slogan "Keep your doctor, fire your Senator," and Lamar Alexander, who warns, “Too often, Obamacare cancels the policy you wanted to keep and tells you what policy to buy.”  Not too long ago, if the Times bothered to acknowledge such positions at all, they'd immediately follow up with some nasty snark.  Instead, this article mentions a Medicare policy of allowing people to change plans in mid-year if their network is abruptly eviscerated, as well as controversy in state legislatures or insurance commissions over whether to force insurers to provide some form of out-of-network coverage.

The Pentagon Loses Its Grip

In the old days we would just have shot him.

Pentagon OKs Manning transfer to civilian prison for gender treatment

...

Some officials have said privately that keeping the soldier in a military prison and unable to have treatment could amount to cruel and unusual punishment....

"No decision to transfer Pvt. Manning to a civilian detention facility has been made, and any such decision will, of course, properly balance the soldier's medical needs with our obligation to ensure she remains behind bars," Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said.

You know, in general I don't care what people do. If you decide that you are really a woman, and you want to go through surgery and whatnot on your own dime, it's a free country. Maybe you really are a woman, if "being a woman" means having a female soul rather than having physical chromosomes of the XX type, and somehow your female soul got trapped in a male body. That's a metaphysical question, and it could even be the truth for all I know. Certainly I'm inclined to believe in souls, and manifestly bodies are not always perfected for us, as we often encounter disabilities in the physical body.

So, if you catch me at my most sympathetic, I can be quite sympathetic to this idea. However, if you've already betrayed your country and stabbed your fellow soldiers in the back, it takes guts to then turn around and demand in the next breath that they start calling you "Chelsea" and pay your way to your new, feminine way of life.

As far as I'm concerned, Mister Manning had better get used to his cell at Leavenworth. I can't believe the military is going along with this, to the point that this Rear Admiral has already adopted the pronoun change for official military statements.

Stands to reason

More from Bookworm Room:  a chart she received from Caped Crusader:

                                                A Tale of Two Cities

                                         Chicago                    Houston
Population                         2.7MM                     2.15MM
Median HH Income          $38,600                    $37,000
% African-American           38.90%                     24%
% Hispanic                         29.90%                     44%
% Asian                               5.50%                       6%
% Non-Hispanic White       28.70%                     26% 

     Pretty similar until you compare the following: 

Concealed carry gun law       No                       Yes
# of Gun Stores                      0                     184 dedicated gun
                                                                      stores plus
                                                                      1500 legal places
                                                                      to buy guns
                                                                      (Walmart, etc.)
Homicides, 2012                 1,806                         207
Homicides per 100K             28.4                         9.6
Avg. January high
temperature (F)                       31                           63 

     Democrat Conclusion:  Cold weather from global warming causes murder.

A Congressman who can communicate

Tired of watching your public representatives stumble all over themselves and put people to sleep trying to explain why it's important not to let the White House get away with Benghazi?  It looks like somebody screwed up and put a guy in charge who knows how to talk to juries.  His opening salvo to the media:  if you'd done your job, I wouldn't have to be asking these questions.



H/t Bookworm Room.

Underground Goes Public

"Underground Atlanta" was a vibrant social district about the turn of the 20th century, when the oldest buildings built since Sherman began to get covered up by viaducts, but died when the cover-up was complete. It became important again in the 1960s, and flowered for a few years because of Georgia's blue laws:

At the time, Fulton County was the only county in the state of Georgia that permitted mixed alcoholic beverages to be served, provided that men wore coats and ties in places that served them. As a result, Underground Atlanta quickly became the center of downtown Atlanta nightlife. Among the more popular spots in Underground Atlanta were Dante's Down the Hatch, Scarlet O'Hara, The Blarney Stone, The Rustler's Den, The Pumphouse, The Front Page, The Bank Note, and Mulenbrink's Saloon, where Atlanta's Piano Red, under the name Dr. Feelgood and the Interns, played from 1969 to 1979. Other attractions included a souvenir shop owned by governor Lester Maddox and a wax museum. With the old-style architecture lending considerable charm to the district, Underground Atlanta was compared to Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

...but died as alcohol laws became more sensible across the state, and crime rates in downtown Atlanta exploded in the wake of desegregation and the resulting White Flight.

It re-opened as a shopping mall in the 1990s, and had one of those Warner Brothers stores that featured big Bugs Bunny statues. The Groundhog Tavern, which was a regular stop for yours truly during the days when I was at Georgia State, was eventually shut down due I gather to drug sales on the premises; otherwise, the core of downtown Atlanta just wasn't a great place for a shopping mall, and shopping malls were dying anyway.

Additionally, the whole surrounding area is just not a friendly place to be. Atlanta has desperately wanted a successful 'fun' district downtown for a long time, but the truth is that it's not a fun place. It's a sterile industrial park masquerading as a city. There are fun towns around the downtown core -- try Decatur! -- but the core itself is the least fun place on earth excepting prisons and other areas explicitly purposed for anti-fun.

Nevertheless, the city has decided that the reason the private sector can't have any fun there is that it was being run by the private sector, and a public-sector solution will do better.

I'm sure it will work out this time.

That Wonderful Public Broadcasting

So now that we're going to enjoy the brilliance of NPR instead of Album 88 on our radio, what do we have to look forward to? How about this meditation on how Ice Cream Trucks are associated with deep-seated American racism?

I came across this gem while researching racial stereotypes. I was a bit conflicted on whether the song warranted a listen. Admittedly, though, beneath my righteous indignation, I was rather curious about how century-old, overt racism sounded and slightly amused by the farcical title. When I started the song, the music that tumbled from the speakers was that of the ever-recognizable jingle of the ice cream truck. (For the record, not all ice cream trucks play this same song, but a great many of them do.)

Well, not only is the song not the same one played by all ice cream trucks, it's just one version of a much older traditional tune better known as "Turkey in the Straw." The article makes that point, but insists that we really need to focus on the racist version because ice cream became popular in association with traveling blackface minstrel shows.

The final part of the article asks whether we should tell our children about the racism embedded in the truck that they -- the children -- care about only because it represents a source of ice cream in the hot summer weather. Should we? "The answer is intellectually complex, but parental intuition provides clarity." This 'complex' answer proves to be, 'Yes, when they are old enough to understand about Santa Claus.'

Can we get a ruling on this nonsense answer? Either this is an ongoing affront to justice, in which case we need to do something about it; or, when our kids ask what the name of the song is, we can just say, "Turkey in the Straw." I'd have never known about the racist minstrel version of the song if NPR hadn't mentioned it, and I'm pretty sure it would not have made America either better or worse if that were the case.

Where there are continuing violations of natural rights, or continuing actual harms due to racism, that's one thing. There remain some places where we really need to carefully investigate the historic injustices in order to make some positive change in accord with true justice.

Picking at scabs is another thing all together.