How establishment is Cochran? Here's longtime House GOP leadership staffer and now self-described bi-partisan "Super Lobbyist" John Feehery reacting to the results last night.
"I guess Mississippi doesn't want Federal money any more. I betcha there are 49 states that will gladly take it."That's exactly the kind of mindset that pervades DC. Politicians are judged on their ability to extract money from you and give it to someone else. Scalp hunting isn't simply ego driven or designed to make people feel good. It's about changing the Republican party.
Scalp-hunting
It looks as though the Mississippi senate republican primary race for is headed for a runoff between longtime incumbent Cochran and insurgent McDaniel. For many, the race has become about the controversy over Cochran's hospitalized wife and who is most guilty of taking advantage of her pitiable condition. Ace sees it differently:
Could be worse
Ralph Peters urges forbearance:
But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows. That bit about serving with “honor and distinction” is the sort of perfunctory catch-phrase politicians briefly don as electoral armor. (“At this point in your speech, ma’am, devote one sentence to how much you honor the troops.”)
I actually believe that Ms. Rice was kind of sincere, in her spectacularly oblivious way. In the best Manchurian Candidate manner, she said what she had been programmed to say by her political culture, then she was blindsided by the firestorm she ignited by scratching two flinty words together. At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.
Awwww
The stakes couldn't be higher for the upcoming midterms: the President's very will to serve.
For White House officials, [the realization of high stakes] crystallized during meetings like the one that Obama, humbled and remorseful, hosted in November [2013] with a dozen Democratic senators. . . .
The senators, all facing reelection in 2014, were furious because they had seen their approval numbers nose dive almost overnight, largely because the most tech-savvy administration in history couldn’t develop a health care website that worked. . . .
According to several participants, Begich and his colleagues demanded to know how committed Obama was to fighting for the Senate majority. Obama was known as a fierce competitor when his name was on the ballot, not so much when it was not.
“I don’t really care to be president without the Senate," Obama said, according to attendees . . . .
The price of lying
If you can't be honest with yourself about what a "war" is, you probably lose sight of what an "end of war is"--notably, the difference between losing a war, on the one hand, and accepting an enemy's surrender on the other. President Obama explains that releasing five extremely dangerous Taliban operatives is no big deal, because that's what happens at the end of wars: the captured soldiers go home and beat their swords into ploughshares.
That was true for George Washington, that was true for Abraham Lincoln, that was true for FDR.I'm trying to remember. Wasn't there something different about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II? It'll come to me.
Best Thing To Do With Death, is Ride Off From It
Two in a week is rough country. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Can A Sitting Federal Judge...?
I'm told the answer to that question is always "Yes." But how about a state "Civil Rights Commission?"
Also, if we made it we made it with peanuts and coconut -- somehow that 'nut allergy' thing got misplaced too. Have to throw the thing out. Didn't realize until this morning. But we'll make another one, as soon as we can get past this huge back-order. Maybe next March? Soon as we can, promise.
Did we turn any wedding cake business away last quarter? Heavens no! But you know, we have problems with our distributors. They're out of state, and they don't like providing flour for gay wedding cakes. We just had to accept their offer to be our sole source of flour because their prices were so good, even though we regret these contractual stipulations. That leaves us with a contractual obligation to these out-of-state businesses not to violate their ethical standards. Now, we aren't asserting any such conscience ourselves -- heavens no! Heavens no! No, it's just a contract -- oddly enough, written to be adjudicated according to Mississippi state law. Not sure how that got in there. Anyway, you can talk to the Mississippi courts about it if it bothers you.
Quarterly sensitivity training? Absolutely. I can't tell you how much that improves the attitude toward thetargets objects subjects of sensitivity. It works great in the Army!
At this point, I'd have a hard time not sympathizing with outright bigots, if these were those. The government has overstepped its bounds. It's asking for whatever it gets here. There are lots of ways to resist an order without violating it.
Baker forced to make gay wedding cakes, undergo sensitivity training, after losing lawsuit.Oh, gee, we forgot to make the cake. Somehow the order got lost. Clerical error, probably that guy who left last month to move to Egypt. Major US ally, Egypt. Great friend of America. You're cool with Muslims, right?
Also, if we made it we made it with peanuts and coconut -- somehow that 'nut allergy' thing got misplaced too. Have to throw the thing out. Didn't realize until this morning. But we'll make another one, as soon as we can get past this huge back-order. Maybe next March? Soon as we can, promise.
Did we turn any wedding cake business away last quarter? Heavens no! But you know, we have problems with our distributors. They're out of state, and they don't like providing flour for gay wedding cakes. We just had to accept their offer to be our sole source of flour because their prices were so good, even though we regret these contractual stipulations. That leaves us with a contractual obligation to these out-of-state businesses not to violate their ethical standards. Now, we aren't asserting any such conscience ourselves -- heavens no! Heavens no! No, it's just a contract -- oddly enough, written to be adjudicated according to Mississippi state law. Not sure how that got in there. Anyway, you can talk to the Mississippi courts about it if it bothers you.
Quarterly sensitivity training? Absolutely. I can't tell you how much that improves the attitude toward the
At this point, I'd have a hard time not sympathizing with outright bigots, if these were those. The government has overstepped its bounds. It's asking for whatever it gets here. There are lots of ways to resist an order without violating it.
Dear Slate Magazine: Don't Tax Beer
This was a bad idea in 1875 or 1919, and it's not gotten better with age.
Recently, Derek Thompson of the Atlantic riffed on new research from the marketing professors Caleb Warren and Margaret C. Thompson, who argue that “coolness” is “a measured violation of malign expectations.” Instead of simply warning young people of the dangers of drunkenness, we need to make binge drinking seem mainstream and thus lame. This will be extremely difficult because, as I’ve learned to my detriment, being drunk can be quite fun—until you wet the bed or start murdering people.Even after that, if they're pansy beer-banners.
Curious
A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn Tuesday when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them....I would think the courts would have some questions about that principle!
The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because the device doesn’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages, but instead operates like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace.
Recently, the Sarasota police department revealed it had used stingrays at least 200 times since 2010 without telling a judge because the device’s manufacturer made it sign a non-disclosure agreement that police claim prevented them from telling the courts.
Science v. Religion?
Jerry A. Coyne has a triumphalist portrayal of atheistic science that he paints as both in conflict with, and ascendant over, religious faith. It is for the most part a sneering, strawman-fighting portrait, but in the end he offers three principles that prove the superiority of science.
Science does not, in fact, have a way of settling many of the 'panoply' of claims he raises. Especially, science can't tell you anything about how human beings ought to live. Those kinds of claims have to be grounded elsewhere. You don't have to ground them in religion, but you do have to ground them in something other than the bare facts about the world.
Christianity serves as the ground for an embrace of mercy, and an ideal that human society should serve the interests of the poor as well as the powerful and wealthy. What would a scientific justification for that look like?
The closest science could come to resolving moral claims lies in the field of virtue ethics. If a virtue is a capacity, a thing like courage that will enable you to do things you couldn't do without, then we could perhaps make some headway with science. We could measure certain practices, and see if they produced increasing courage -- although measuring that in scientific terms might be challenging! First, after all, you have to define courage so that you can be certain what you want to measure. (Why is that a problem? See Plato's Laches, and Wittgenstein's 'private language' argument.)
For values beyond virtues, science can't help you. And for virtues, well, they're any excellence of capacity. Hang on to that thought.
Coyne would like you to dispose of the doctrine entirely. But then you lose the ground of the moral commitment -- that one and many others. But notice something else. Insofar as this commitment creates scientists who are devoted to an honest understanding of their results, it is a virtue from the perspective of science itself. Now we said before that a virtue is any sort of excellence of capacity; here is a virtue especially for the practice of science. Faith in Maimonides' mode is a scientific virtue.
Nevertheless, it is true that science and religion have different philosophical bases. This is why religion is the kind of philosophical commitment that can ground a moral code broader than virtue ethics. That is a virtue(!) that science lacks.
But it's also why the claim of progress isn't very interesting. Science by nature pursues finite things. The scientific method requires this. In order to conduct experiments that falsify a hypothesis, it is necessary that the measurements be limited in time. It is necessary that you study a thing that has limits. Ideally, you want to focus on just one variable -- a very finite limit indeed! Religion, by contrast, deals with ultimate truth. This is not a finite question, as is easily proven: for it includes the truth about numbers, and numbers are not finite.
So let us say that we have two fields of study, one that considers the finite, and one the infinite. People begin trying to draw a picture of what the object of their study looks like. They start with a triangle, and then add another line, and then another. Each additional side improves the conception of the object of study, approaching a true and correct picture.
In a few hundred years, the first field will have made significant progress in its study. No matter how large the number of sides on the actual object of their field of study, progress will be obvious. If it had eight sides, then at first you would have 3/8ths of the truth; then 4/8ths, or half the truth, which is progress. Eventually you would have 8/8ths of the truth. So to for an object of any size: if it has N sides, at first you would have 3/N, then 4/N... and eventually N/N.
(At least you would, if you could be finally certain that you'd gotten the sides correct. Science doesn't quite work that way, but by eliminating possibilities rather than confirming them. So to be quite right, we'd have to count backwards: first we've eliminated three possibilities, now four, now ten, now a thousand, in pursuit of a negative N).
The students of the infinite, by contrast, will still be infinitely far away from their goal (a point made by Nicholas of Cusa, from whom I borrow the metaphor). This is true even if they'd added just as many sides as the finite students, or far more sides. (Or subtracted them.) The two kinds of study are different in such a way that 'measurable progress' is not a helpful standard, because it is built into the nature of the inquiry.
So is religion a way of pursuing truth? Of course it is. Is it a way of finding it? Well, the truth it seeks is infinite. Just as no scientist will ever prove a truth because the scientific method can only disprove things, so too in religion there is a structural feature that prevents a final attainment of capital-T Truth. In science this feature is less obvious because it studies finite things, and so the approximation can eventually become good enough that we might no longer notice that we haven't actually come to say what is true, but only eliminated enough things that are false that our approximation of the truth of that finite question is satisfying.
Yet it is satisfying, even then, only when we ponder that question. There are many questions beyond those kinds of questions. Another method is needed to pursue those answers. There need be no conflict between science and religion: science can carry us as far as it can, and after that, faith is the only virtue there is.
1. They both make truth claims about the universe, but only science has a way to settle those claims. Except for deistic religions, or godless “religions” like Taoism or Unitarian Universalism, most religions make existence claims about gods, the nature of those gods, and how those gods want us to live. Christianity, for instance, argues that there is a single God (often tripartite with Jesus and the Holy Ghost); that he sent his son, born of a virgin, down to be murdered to atone for an original sin infecting all humans; that Jesus came back to life three days after he was killed; and that some day he will return to Earth, sentencing all of us to either eternal life or the flames of hell. Those are empirical claims about the universe: they are either true or false. But the problem is that they conflict with the “truth claims” of other faiths. If you’re a Muslim, for instance, belief in Christ’s divinity will doom you to hell. Hinduism has many gods, Jews don’t believe in an afterlife, and Unitarians reject the Trinity. Almost all religious schisms, which eventually gave rise to the more than 10,000 Christian sects on Earth today, were based on irresolvable claims about what is true.This is wrong for several reasons.
Religion has no way to settle its panoply of conflicting claims. In contrast, science can adjudicate empirical claims, for science is a toolkit: a way of thinking and doing that actually helps us understand the universe. There are thousands of religions, but there is only one science. Scientists of all faiths and ethnicities use the same methodology and agree on the same set of truths. Think of how far the unanimity of scientific understanding has progressed since 1500! Now think how far theology has progressed since 1500, at least in terms of understanding the true nature of the divine. It hasn’t budged an inch. We can’t even settle the issue of how many gods there are, much less if any exist at all. That’s what happens when you rely on faith rather than reason, and when you discern truth by listening to clerics or your own thoughts rather than by examining what actually exists out there in nature.
Science does not, in fact, have a way of settling many of the 'panoply' of claims he raises. Especially, science can't tell you anything about how human beings ought to live. Those kinds of claims have to be grounded elsewhere. You don't have to ground them in religion, but you do have to ground them in something other than the bare facts about the world.
Christianity serves as the ground for an embrace of mercy, and an ideal that human society should serve the interests of the poor as well as the powerful and wealthy. What would a scientific justification for that look like?
The closest science could come to resolving moral claims lies in the field of virtue ethics. If a virtue is a capacity, a thing like courage that will enable you to do things you couldn't do without, then we could perhaps make some headway with science. We could measure certain practices, and see if they produced increasing courage -- although measuring that in scientific terms might be challenging! First, after all, you have to define courage so that you can be certain what you want to measure. (Why is that a problem? See Plato's Laches, and Wittgenstein's 'private language' argument.)
For values beyond virtues, science can't help you. And for virtues, well, they're any excellence of capacity. Hang on to that thought.
2. Science and religious “investigation” produce different outcomes. Religion’s search for “truth” could have resulted in the same things that science has discovered, but it never has. The Bible, or God, could have pronounced that washing your hands might curb disease, or that, instead of being created de novo, life evolved from very simple precursors. But scripture didn’t say that, and science has repeatedly corrected the false conclusions of religious dogma.One of the great writers on the subject is the Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. He doesn't at all say that 'the Bible isn't entirely true.' What he says is that the Torah is true, but it speaks in the language of men. Sometimes its truth is metaphorical. Maimonides is a tireless advocate of the sciences of the day, and articulates a principle in which the search for truth is bolstered by a community of faith whose moral commitments include a determination to speak the truth about what they find through experiment or dialectic. If that seems to conflict with an established religious doctrine, Maimonides says, the right thing to do is to reconsider whether you have understood correctly what was present in the doctrine. This is a moral commitment grounded in faith because it is a kind of natural theology: a desire to understand more about God by understanding His works. You must be honest in this endeavor exactly as you are faithful to God.
The response of theologians is this: “The Bible is not a textbook of science.” Yet what they really mean by that is, “The Bible isn’t entirely true.” This then gives them license to decide which parts of the Bible are true (conveniently, they are the bits that science hasn’t yet disproven, or those that best align with modern morality) and which parts are false (for example, God’s approbation of stoning for adultery and death for homosexuality). This disparity in outcomes derives from the disparity of methods. Religion begins with conclusions that are comforting, and then picks and chooses evidence that supports those conclusions, ignoring the pesky counterevidence or fobbing it off as “metaphor.” In contrast, science is designed to prevent you from that kind of confirmation bias: it’s a method, as physicist Richard Feynman noted, that keeps you from fooling yourself and finding what you’d like be true instead of what’s really true.
Coyne would like you to dispose of the doctrine entirely. But then you lose the ground of the moral commitment -- that one and many others. But notice something else. Insofar as this commitment creates scientists who are devoted to an honest understanding of their results, it is a virtue from the perspective of science itself. Now we said before that a virtue is any sort of excellence of capacity; here is a virtue especially for the practice of science. Faith in Maimonides' mode is a scientific virtue.
3. Science and religion have different philosophical bases. After centuries of experience, science has discarded the idea of God because it’s never been useful in explaining anything. Most religions still cling to the idea of deities, even in the absence of evidence, for a bad reason: faith. Although theologians weave a web of obscurantist verbiage around the word “faith,” it all comes down to believing something without good reasons. How can you possibly find out what’s true if you base your search for truth on confirmation bias and on assertions unsupported by evidence? How can you want to base your life on such assertions? And, if you’re a Christian, Jew, or Hindu, how can you be sure that your religion is the right one, and that, say, the tenets of Islam are simply wrong? You can never know. Religion is incompatible not only with science, but also with other religions.Unfortunately for the argument, we just finished proving that faith is a virtue -- at least that it can be, insofar as it is understood as a commitment to search for truth about God by searching for an honest and complete understanding of His work.
In the end, the conflict between science and religion can’t be papered over by polling people who don’t want there to be a conflict. After all, most religionists pride themselves on modernity, and don’t want to be seen as unfriendly to a science that has improved their lives immeasurably. The real conflict—the one that will be with us so long as religion pretends to find truth—is between rationality and superstition. It is a conflict between using faith to discern what is real as opposed to using reason and observation of the universe. Ecklund can conduct surveys until Templeton runs out of cash, but she’ll never turn religion into a way to find truth—or to help science find truth. And so the incompatibility will remain until we realize that faith is not a virtue.
Nevertheless, it is true that science and religion have different philosophical bases. This is why religion is the kind of philosophical commitment that can ground a moral code broader than virtue ethics. That is a virtue(!) that science lacks.
But it's also why the claim of progress isn't very interesting. Science by nature pursues finite things. The scientific method requires this. In order to conduct experiments that falsify a hypothesis, it is necessary that the measurements be limited in time. It is necessary that you study a thing that has limits. Ideally, you want to focus on just one variable -- a very finite limit indeed! Religion, by contrast, deals with ultimate truth. This is not a finite question, as is easily proven: for it includes the truth about numbers, and numbers are not finite.
So let us say that we have two fields of study, one that considers the finite, and one the infinite. People begin trying to draw a picture of what the object of their study looks like. They start with a triangle, and then add another line, and then another. Each additional side improves the conception of the object of study, approaching a true and correct picture.
In a few hundred years, the first field will have made significant progress in its study. No matter how large the number of sides on the actual object of their field of study, progress will be obvious. If it had eight sides, then at first you would have 3/8ths of the truth; then 4/8ths, or half the truth, which is progress. Eventually you would have 8/8ths of the truth. So to for an object of any size: if it has N sides, at first you would have 3/N, then 4/N... and eventually N/N.
(At least you would, if you could be finally certain that you'd gotten the sides correct. Science doesn't quite work that way, but by eliminating possibilities rather than confirming them. So to be quite right, we'd have to count backwards: first we've eliminated three possibilities, now four, now ten, now a thousand, in pursuit of a negative N).
The students of the infinite, by contrast, will still be infinitely far away from their goal (a point made by Nicholas of Cusa, from whom I borrow the metaphor). This is true even if they'd added just as many sides as the finite students, or far more sides. (Or subtracted them.) The two kinds of study are different in such a way that 'measurable progress' is not a helpful standard, because it is built into the nature of the inquiry.
So is religion a way of pursuing truth? Of course it is. Is it a way of finding it? Well, the truth it seeks is infinite. Just as no scientist will ever prove a truth because the scientific method can only disprove things, so too in religion there is a structural feature that prevents a final attainment of capital-T Truth. In science this feature is less obvious because it studies finite things, and so the approximation can eventually become good enough that we might no longer notice that we haven't actually come to say what is true, but only eliminated enough things that are false that our approximation of the truth of that finite question is satisfying.
Yet it is satisfying, even then, only when we ponder that question. There are many questions beyond those kinds of questions. Another method is needed to pursue those answers. There need be no conflict between science and religion: science can carry us as far as it can, and after that, faith is the only virtue there is.
This gives me ideas
No bears around here, but this footage of a black bear making himself at home in a Florida hammock "like he was a tourist" inspires me to weave a hammock. It's just macrame, right?
Gendermania
Matt Walsh puts his finger on exactly what confuses me the most--besides the whole genital mutilation thing--about transexuals:
If a girl declares that she’s a lesbian, progressives would tell us that this identity cannot be modified. It is ingrained in her soul and nothing can ever alter it. Her sexual preference is immutable. Her sex, however? Fluid. Subject to change. . . .
Ryland showed signs of being transgender because she didn't like girly toys and she didn't like to wear dresses. My first thought is that maybe she's a girl who just doesn't like girly toys or dresses. But apparently girly toys and dresses are so important to the female identity that you lose the identity when you reject the toys and dresses.
Since someone already opened the table to Star Wars
There have been leaked (intentionally by Disney, or by an employee who cannot contain their enthusiasm/greed) from the new Star Wars workshops. Here's my favorite:
That is a life sized Millennium Falcon cockpit. Here's a shot of the rest of the construction to give a better idea of scale:
What this means is, they're building the ship as a physical object, not as a 3D computer environment. Apparently, Disney heeded the numerous complaints from fans that the CGI was massively overused/overdone in the three prequels, and is going back to the roots of the franchise. And clearly, they're putting real money into it, as something of this size is surely expensive. Especially if (as it appears to be) this is going to be used as a backdrop as well as a shooting location.
As I said to my friend who linked this, this is exactly why I was pleased when I heard that Disney bought the rights from Lucas.
That is a life sized Millennium Falcon cockpit. Here's a shot of the rest of the construction to give a better idea of scale:
What this means is, they're building the ship as a physical object, not as a 3D computer environment. Apparently, Disney heeded the numerous complaints from fans that the CGI was massively overused/overdone in the three prequels, and is going back to the roots of the franchise. And clearly, they're putting real money into it, as something of this size is surely expensive. Especially if (as it appears to be) this is going to be used as a backdrop as well as a shooting location.
As I said to my friend who linked this, this is exactly why I was pleased when I heard that Disney bought the rights from Lucas.
Do I have to pay the taxes I vote for?
It hardly seems fair:
“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.
“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”It's not that I don't like paying taxes, or that I don't want all the stuff that taxes pay for, it's just that I don't want to pay the taxes that pay for all the stuff I want. You know, the big picture.
Lilium Inter Spinas
Speaking of adventurous cooking, did you know that the day lily is edible? Not the true lilies, which are certainly not! But the day lily is a food with an ancient pedigree in Europe and Asia.
I learned this tonight, when my wife made us Day Lily Blossom Fritters stuffed with jalapenos, bacon, and cheese.
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These things are fantastically good.
More on the topic here.
UPDATE: Still more adventure.
I learned this tonight, when my wife made us Day Lily Blossom Fritters stuffed with jalapenos, bacon, and cheese.
.JPG)
These things are fantastically good.
More on the topic here.
UPDATE: Still more adventure.
How ya gonna get 'em to stay on the farm?
Bookwoom Room points us toward this news of exciting developments in Belarussian policy toward agricultural workers:
Alexander Lukashenko is living up to his reputation as Europe’s last remaining dictator. The president of Belarus has decided to bring back serfdom on farms in a bid to stop urban migration.
Lukashenko has announced plans to introduce legislation prohibiting farm labourers from quitting their jobs and moving to the cities. “Yesterday, a decree was put on my table concerning – we are speaking bluntly – serfdom,” the Belarus leader told a meeting on Tuesday to discuss improvements to livestock farming, gazeta.ru reported.
. . . Low agricultural wages and limited prospects have persuaded many farm workers to leave the countryside to seek opportunities in the cities or in neighbouring Russia.
. . .
If Lukashenko signs the serfdom decree, Belarus will be in violation of the 1957 international convention on the abolition of forced labour to which it is a signatory. That didn’t stop him adopting a law in 2012 stopping timber industry workers from quitting their jobs and it probably won’t stop him now.
Russia may however raise objections.That last part makes me feel lots better.
A Book Recommendation from Douglas
Especially for me and Tex, Douglas recommends Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World.
I have to admit that the thesis statement makes it sound a lot like The Secret for Capitalists. If I were a betting man (and I am), I would wager that the author has formed this thesis by getting the correlation/causation of changing attitudes exactly backwards.
However, it would be unfair to render such a judgment with any finality without actually reading it. I forward it merely as an initial impression based only on her abstract and the associated press material. We should consider the arguments.
I have to admit that the thesis statement makes it sound a lot like The Secret for Capitalists. If I were a betting man (and I am), I would wager that the author has formed this thesis by getting the correlation/causation of changing attitudes exactly backwards.
However, it would be unfair to render such a judgment with any finality without actually reading it. I forward it merely as an initial impression based only on her abstract and the associated press material. We should consider the arguments.
What would we do without gender research
Don't these people seem to be, ah, reaching just a tad?
[H]istorically, hurricanes with female names have, on average, killed more people than those with male ones. . . . As they write, “changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple its death toll”.
Why?
The names certainly don’t reflect a storm’s severity, and they alternate genders from one to the next.
Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity. Thanks to these biases, people might take greater precautions to protect themselves from Hurricane Victor, while reacting more apathetically to Hurricane Victoria.
Taxis and Monopolies
Mark Perry of AEI notes that taxi medallion prices are flat for the first time pretty much ever, and discusses the impact of competition from companies like on-line "Uber."
Loser pays
One small step for tort reform. Well, I know it's not tort, exactly, but it's the same principle. A patent troll may find itself on the hook for $200,000 in defense counsel fees. The recent Supreme Court that made this result possible was issued by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan (with Scalia quibbling only over some footnotes): a decidedly nonpartisan decision.
A Viking Age Cookbook
If Tex's recent post about bread-making has left you feeling adventurous, nothing says 'adventure' like Vikings.
Liberation
Now that President Obama has proven Congress can’t stop him from releasing terrorists, the administration could be primed to empty out the prison at Guantanamo Bay.It's amazing what can be accomplished once you prove to yourself that you aren't bound by the law.
Failure
Geraghty again, whose newsletter I can't link to, unfortunately--you have to sign up for it (it's free) if you're interested:
And now the mild sympathy for President Obama: one of the most difficult tasks in life is coming to terms with a really awful failure of one's own making. And while you can spread blame around — Shinseki, Kathleen Sebelius, Hillary Clinton -- ultimately the buck stops with him; he's the one who put all of those folks in that position.
If Obama had come out Friday afternoon and declared he felt betrayed by Eric Shinseki, that he had trusted him to keep a close eye on his department, and that he never imagined such a distinguished veteran would prove so ineffective at combatting a culture of complacency and unaccountability . . . those of us who aren't so enamored with him could at least believe the president was learning some hard truths about the presidency. Bureaucracies always tell you that they're making progress. They'll always spotlight circumstances of seeming or even genuine improvement, and downplay or hide inexcusable failures. They'll never tell you that they've screwed up royally, with catastrophic consequences, until it's on the front page.
If you were Obama, wouldn't you be furious with Shinseki? Would you be mad at yourself? Mad at Sebelius? Wouldn't failures this big prompt you to rethink how you approach these types of challenges?
My suspicion — and fear — is that Obama can't do that. He can't have an honest reckoning of his increasingly disastrous presidency because it would shake the foundation of his life's work. It would mean his critics were largely right all along.I'm angry enough with the President to enjoy reading this, but it also makes me thoughtful about how I've come to terms with really awful failures of my own making. Shame has a tendency to make me run and hide, too, rather than own up, improve, and keep at the job. Not all failures make me react that way, but really shameful ones do.
No Knock
A local magistrate issued a “no-knock warrant” to raid the house, partly because of the info linking the suspect to “assault-type weapons.” When the cops got there and tried to open the door, they felt something blocking it so they tossed in a flash-bang. The obstacle turned out to be … the playpen, with the baby inside. Here’s a photo of the aftermath, if you can stomach it. The suspect wasn’t even there[.]Why not knock? The danger is that the drugs could get flushed. That danger has to be compared to other dangers.
The Road Helps
The consolation of tragedy is a renewed attention to the world. For those of you who are interested, some pictures from the road.
Movements of peoples
Zerohedge has some interesting maps of immigration patterns over the last century, showing the predominant country of origin of immigrants to each state in the U.S. The overall trend is toward a massive influx from Mexico, which is hardly news, but there are lots of surprises tucked in there. For instance, I never would have guessed that the largest flow of immigrants to New York State in 1910 would be from Russia. It's also surprising to see what a worldwide melting pot was going on a century ago, and how little of that there is now.
Switching gears to much older immigration patterns, I've been tempted to buy the new book by Brian Sykes, "DNA USA." I enjoyed "The Seven Daughters of Eve," which traced movements of peoples by examining their mitochondrial DNA. The new book is getting lukewarm reviews, though, and sounds like it's got a bit of interesting DNA data patched together with a rambling travelogue. So I'm hoping someone will publish a summary of the good stuff. One good source is Amazon reviews, which yield the following interesting snippets:
Native Americans descended from a handful of matrilineal (mitochonddrial) clusters that arrived in the New World between about 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Three of the clusters are genetically linked to Siberians who originated in Central Asia. The fourth cluster is linked to a Polynesian strain that arrived in the Cook Island about 3,000 years ago, from Taiwan; it is absent among the Eskimos and concentrated in Central and South America. A fifth cluster is found in North America, but not Alaska. It appears not to have originated from Asia, but instead from Europe--not the 16th-century European wave but a population from 16,000 years ago. How did they get here? Presumably not overland, across Asia and then Beringia, or they'd show up in Alaska today, but it's hard to imagine an Atlantic crossing, either, not that early. That cluster seems like a real wild card.
Switching gears to much older immigration patterns, I've been tempted to buy the new book by Brian Sykes, "DNA USA." I enjoyed "The Seven Daughters of Eve," which traced movements of peoples by examining their mitochondrial DNA. The new book is getting lukewarm reviews, though, and sounds like it's got a bit of interesting DNA data patched together with a rambling travelogue. So I'm hoping someone will publish a summary of the good stuff. One good source is Amazon reviews, which yield the following interesting snippets:
Native Americans descended from a handful of matrilineal (mitochonddrial) clusters that arrived in the New World between about 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Three of the clusters are genetically linked to Siberians who originated in Central Asia. The fourth cluster is linked to a Polynesian strain that arrived in the Cook Island about 3,000 years ago, from Taiwan; it is absent among the Eskimos and concentrated in Central and South America. A fifth cluster is found in North America, but not Alaska. It appears not to have originated from Asia, but instead from Europe--not the 16th-century European wave but a population from 16,000 years ago. How did they get here? Presumably not overland, across Asia and then Beringia, or they'd show up in Alaska today, but it's hard to imagine an Atlantic crossing, either, not that early. That cluster seems like a real wild card.
Memos From The Road
Due to family business, there has been a great deal of travel to do just lately. I may be a bit catching up.
The speech, translated
Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club channels the President at West Point:
Those who argue otherwise — are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics – or simply remember what I promised only 5 years ago and are holding me up to my promises. For it's true I promised to reach out to the Islamic World, win Afghanistan, stabilize the Middle East, and reset the relationship with Russia. None of that happened, because I’m playing the Long Game. You thought success would look different. I’m saying you’re not smart enough to realize what success is.
. . . Inside every Islamic extremist is a nice guy just waiting for a payoff. Today, as part of this effort, I am calling on Congress to support a new counterterrorism partnerships fund of up to $5 billion, because I need a slush fund to keep doing whatever we weren’t doing that night in Benghazi.
. . . With the additional resources I’m announcing today, we will step up our efforts to support Syria’s neighbors — Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq — in order to spread the trouble there. That way the solution, when it comes, will not be piecemeal but comprehensive. We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield. Nor must we help our allies when sucking up to our enemies will work just as well.
. . . NATO was the strongest alliance the world, made up mostly of us. Now that I’ve taken out the “us” we have more room for diplomacy. You see, we have to talk. We can’t fight any more. That’s why you owe me one. I’ve saved your life. Never again will you have to take to the battlefield. There’s no point. With any luck you’ll just have work as props from now on. To sit in front of me when I talk, to stand behind me when I talk. American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. Let’s show everyone that there’s no enemy, no danger, no peril we can’t run away from or try to buy off.
Isolated incidents
I'm starting to wonder whether there were any VA facilities that didn't falsify their waiting lists.
The audit, issued as VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, found that 64 percent of the 216 VA facilities reviewed had at least one instance where a veterans’ desired appointment date had been changed. The review found 13 percent of schedulers had received specific instructions to misrepresent wait times. …
"We've been looking for you for a long time."
A U.S. soldier is freed after five years of captivity in Afghanistan.
Instruction manuals
DNA uses three-base "words" for each amino acid building-block for a protein. Some of the words, though, have alternative functions as punctuation, as in "start sequence" and "stop sequence." Our remote ancestors settled into these punctuation conventions so long ago that most current life on Earth uses the same ones, but it seems that a few organisms here and there employ a different system. That wouldn't matter so much if all their DNA did was talk to their own cells, but bacteria and viruses have a way of spreading their DNA around somewhat promiscuously. What a mess it seems this would make, if DNA from a system with one convention for "start/stop" ended up in the genes of a system with another. Somehow, they work it out.
The staff of life
I've been trying to make bread for years, but producing only unappealing bricks. Our newest cookbook, "Twenty," by Mark Ruhlman, promised that it would remove all the frustration from breadmaking. The main thing, he says, is to weigh the ingredients instead of measuring their volume. Keep the flour and water at a 5/3 ratio by weight, and everything will work. And just look at this gorgeous loaf:
The bread mystery is solved! My loaf was so tender that it was hard to cut it even after it had rested for 30 minutes, and yet it has a nice crust. I hand-kneaded the dough on the first go-round for about ten minutes. The "crumb," if that's what you call the size and patterns of holes, is satisfactory for the first time. The recipe said to keep it up until a small piece could be stretched to translucency; I'm not sure I got there, but it must have been OK. Then I let it rise in a bowl covered with cling wrap for about 2-1/2 hours. The recipe said 2-4 hours, but stop when it's about doubled in size and doesn't spring back when you poke a hole into with a finger. This is the stage where I normally fail, as the dough never seemed to rise properly. Then punch it down and knead it briefly, let it rest 10 minutes with a towel over it, squish it into as small a ball as possible, and set it in a covered dutch oven that's been oiled on the bottom and sides. (Whoops, edit, I forgot this part: let it rise a second time in the oiled pan for 30-60 minutes, depending on how warm the kitchen is. Without punching it down this time,) Oil the top of the dough slightly and score it with a sharp knife. Put it in a preheated 450-degree oven for 30 minutes, covered, then reduce the heat to 375 degrees and remove the cover. Bake a few minutes longer until it looks beautiful and an instant-read thermometer registers 200 degrees in the center. I used one of those remote-sensor devices that buzzes when the temperature hits a set point. Then cool it on a rack for 30 more minutes before cutting.
This loaf contains 33 ounces of white bread flour and 20 ounces of water, about 2-1/2 tsp. of salt, and 1-1/2 tsp of active dry yeast. I really meant to use 20 ounces of flour and 12 of water, but I got confused and poured in 20 oz. of water. No problem, I just added another 13 oz. of flour and increased the yeast and salt a bit from the original recipe's call for 2 tsp salt and 1 tsp yeast. The final loaf was a suitable size, taking up most of the room in a large Le Creuset enameled cast-iron pot and producing sandwich-worthy slices.
This truly is a lifetime triumph. For this and other reasons, Ruhlman's cookbook is well worth the price. It has 20 chapters, each focusing on something basic like stock or eggs.
This loaf contains 33 ounces of white bread flour and 20 ounces of water, about 2-1/2 tsp. of salt, and 1-1/2 tsp of active dry yeast. I really meant to use 20 ounces of flour and 12 of water, but I got confused and poured in 20 oz. of water. No problem, I just added another 13 oz. of flour and increased the yeast and salt a bit from the original recipe's call for 2 tsp salt and 1 tsp yeast. The final loaf was a suitable size, taking up most of the room in a large Le Creuset enameled cast-iron pot and producing sandwich-worthy slices.
This truly is a lifetime triumph. For this and other reasons, Ruhlman's cookbook is well worth the price. It has 20 chapters, each focusing on something basic like stock or eggs.
Cheer up, conservatives!
Jim Geraghty points to a number of hopeful signs, and advises us to quit putting our savings into gold and scouting out property in Belize:
Faith in the future is returning; we're making more new Americans — a.k.a. "babies" — again: The newest child birth rate numbers have just been released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the report indicates that there were 4,736 more births in 2013 than there were the year before, which shows an increase that America hasn't seen in five years.
We're doing this while reducing teen pregnancy, births, and abortions: In examining birth and health certificates from 2010 (the most recent data available), Guttmacher Institute found that approximately 6 percent of teenagers (57.4 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls) became pregnant — the lowest rate in 30 years and down from its peak of 51 percent in 1991. Between 2008 and 2010 alone, there was a 15-percent drop.
At 34.4 births per 1,000 teenage women, the birthrate was down 44 percent from its peak rate of 61.8 in 1991. The abortion rate is down too: In 2010, there were 14.7 abortions per 1,000 teenagers, which is the lowest it's been since the procedure was legalized. . . .
The scale of the U.S. energy boom is jaw-dropping: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of new jobs in the oil-and-gas industry (technically a part of mining) increased by roughly 270,000 between 2003 and 2012. This is an increase of about 92% compared with a 3% increase in all jobs during the same period. The BLS reports that the U.S. average annual wage (which excludes employer-paid benefits) in the oil and gas industry was about $107,200 during 2012, the latest full year available. That's more than double the average of $49,300 for all workers."
We're at the dawn of the era of private spaceflight: "SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada are building new manned spacecraft with the goal of restoring U.S. human spaceflight capability by 2017."
. . . As David Plotz lays out, there has never been more news published than there is today; web sites of media organizations from the New York Times to Fox News publish literally hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new items a day. Sure, you can say a lot of it's crap. A lot of anything is crap. But the barrier to entry in the news world is obliterated. We're no longer in an era where the number of pages and column-inches in the New York Times, and the time limits of the nightly news,set the limits for what the public sees and reads. Despite the commencement mobs and the political-correctness enforcers, this is a golden age for free speech.
Star Wars in a nutshell
Via Ace:
The reason the first three Star Wars movies were so terrific, and the second three sucked so bad, is actually very simple. The first three were about rebels, shooting guns and driving fast, and speaking with American accents. The second three were about politicians, discussing treaties and holding court, and speaking with British accents.
-- Bill Whittle
The Unlegislature
This kind of thing almost gives me hope:
It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it.
Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. . . .
“We got rid of all the silly laws,” said Tony Sertich, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board commissioner who headed Dayton’s effort.OK, "all" surely is an exaggeration, but I commend the effort anyway.
Customer choice, education division
New Orleans was so ravaged by Hurricane Katrina that apparently people were willing to try anything. The city became a one-of-a-kind petri dish for student choice, and (to the amazement of many) accomplished an incredible feat:
Before the storm, the city’s high school graduation rate was 54.4 percent. In 2013, the rate for the Recovery School District was 77.6 percent. On average, 57 percent of students performed at grade level in math and reading in 2013, up from 23 percent in 2007, according to the state.How did they do it? By spending a boatload of money? Well, in part:
When Katrina struck in 2005, the public schools in New Orleans were considered among the worst in the country. Just before the storm, the elected Orleans Parish School District was bankrupt and couldn’t account for about $71 million in federal money. . . .
The city is spending about $2 billion — much of it federal hurricane recovery money — to refurbish and build schools across the city, which are then leased to charter operators at no cost. . . .
After Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board fired more than 7,000 employees — nearly all of them African American — while the charter schools hired scores of young teachers, many of them white recruits from Teach for America. The fired teachers sued for wrongful termination and won a judgment that could total more than $1 billion.So some new money definitely has been injected into the city's education system. On the other hand, a lot of that money was spent bribing teachers to go away so they could be replaced. The comments to this WaPo story contain the predictable complaints that school reformers just want to make a buck. Whether or not making a buck is a bad thing, though, the fact is that the New Orleans experiment isn't about profit vs. non-profit schools. It's not even about private vs. public schools. There is a small voucher program in Louisiana that permits some public-school students to attend private schools, some of which no doubt are for-profit institutions. And in some parts of the country, there may be a lot of for-profit charter schools. But what's happened in New Orleans is that the public schools are still public and still non-profit. The difference is that parents can now leave a failing school and choose another. All that changed was customer choice: the power of competition and consequences for failure to improve an institution's performance.
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.
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:
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.
12:42 PMThe 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.
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.
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.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.
The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective).
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.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.
...
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.
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:
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.
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?Another of the right questions, then: "So what?" Is there any mechanism of accountability or consequence?
No one’s even pretending DOJ had anything resembling the authority to do this.
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.
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:
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:
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
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:
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?
“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.”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.)
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.
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....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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.)
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.
It is a solemn day. I trust you all spent it well.
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:
How did we get to the point where we worry that a system for deciding how to allocate federal subsidies elevated financial concerns inappropriately?
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.
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:
But there's this, too:
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.
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.
_1870.jpg)
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:
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.
_1870.jpg)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.”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 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.
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.
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